Twenty years ago, during my first year in academia, my Pascal tutor set us some top-notch assignments.

Your mission:

Write a program which draws a diamond of the form illustrated below. The letter which is to appear at the widest point of the figure (E in the example) is to be specified as input data.

Here’s a scan of the original hand-out:

My original Pascal solution, which I prototyped using BBC Basic V, took less than a page of fan-fold listing paper and was implemented as a console application. 50% of the listing dealt with input validation and “do you want to run the program again?” code! I will convert the example line-by-line into C# for later publication here! Of course, were I to write it today, it should look very different!

I’d be keen to see your solutions, written in your choice of programming language. Novelty value for uniqueness in your choice of programming language may well be rewarded! Procedural, object-oriented, functional, dynamic, verbose, terse…the choice is yours!

“What’s in it for me?” you might ask?
Well, nothing really, a bit of kudos and the feeling of a job well done! However, I will offer the two best/novel UK-based solutions a much-coveted DDD polo shirt (modelled here!). My decision is final, colour may vary, size might not be the same size as you, yada yada, other legalese applies, etc.

Submission by comments here on this post, by e-mail (top right About Me), or via Twitter @camurphy please!

Over to you!

UPDATE: Comments seem to mangle the code formatting, it has been suggested that code is submitted either via e-mail or via http://pastebin.com/