exercism/rust/hamming

Hamming

Calculate the Hamming difference between two DNA strands.

A mutation is simply a mistake that occurs during the creation or copying of a nucleic acid, in particular DNA. Because nucleic acids are vital to cellular functions, mutations tend to cause a ripple effect throughout the cell. Although mutations are technically mistakes, a very rare mutation may equip the cell with a beneficial attribute. In fact, the macro effects of evolution are attributable by the accumulated result of beneficial microscopic mutations over many generations.

The simplest and most common type of nucleic acid mutation is a point mutation, which replaces one base with another at a single nucleotide.

By counting the number of differences between two homologous DNA strands taken from different genomes with a common ancestor, we get a measure of the minimum number of point mutations that could have occurred on the evolutionary path between the two strands.

This is called the 'Hamming distance'.

It is found by comparing two DNA strands and counting how many of the nucleotides are different from their equivalent in the other string.

GAGCCTACTAACGGGAT
CATCGTAATGACGGCCT
^ ^ ^  ^ ^    ^^

The Hamming distance between these two DNA strands is 7.

Implementation notes

The Hamming distance is only defined for sequences of equal length. This means that based on the definition, each language could deal with getting sequences of equal length differently.

Rust Installation

Refer to the exercism help page for Rust installation and learning resources.

Writing the Code

Execute the tests with:

$ cargo test

All but the first test have been ignored. After you get the first test to pass, remove the ignore flag (#[ignore]) from the next test and get the tests to pass again. The test file is located in the tests directory. You can also remove the ignore flag from all the tests to get them to run all at once if you wish.

Make sure to read the Crates and Modules chapter if you haven't already, it will help you with organizing your files.

Feedback, Issues, Pull Requests

The exercism/xrust repository on GitHub is the home for all of the Rust exercises. If you have feedback about an exercise, or want to help implement new exercises, head over there and create an issue. Members of the rust track team are happy to help!

If you want to know more about Exercism, take a look at the contribution guide.

Source

The Calculating Point Mutations problem at Rosalind http://rosalind.info/problems/hamm/

Submitting Incomplete Problems

It's possible to submit an incomplete solution so you can see how others have completed the exercise.