You have interpreted "consecutive" differently to the way I have. To me, it means that no character is followed by the next character in the 0-F sequence.

In your first example, 5A2C74CD74, there are the consecutive characters 'C' and 'D'.

We'll have to hear from the OP to decide this question.

Security experts discourage repeat characters because such passwords are insecure. A person whose "lucky number" is 7 might be tempted to establish a password such as 7777777777. For that matter, the easy-to-remember password 1234567890 is also insecure.

If your interpretation is correct, that makes this programming task more challenging.

Should we also prohibit downward increments such as 9876543210? How about "flip-flop" passwords such as 6969696969?

Daniel B. Martin

I suspect we will be waiting a long time. ;)

It's interesting how often that happens with noobs when they only get hints instead of a complete program as an answer to their query. However, I still prefer to offer some hints instead of accusing them of looking for answers to their "homework" (they might be genuine).

Actually, my psuedo-code handled it quite readily. I tested it using "blassic" (the quickest way) and none of the passwords it generated have 2 consecutive characters. Here are 10 outputs it generated:

Well not going left to right :)

I might have had an overly narrow interpretation of "never have 2 consecutive characters side by side" but it is easy enough to modify the non_consecutive() function to incorporate ascending order, descending order and even equal characters if that is what the user wants. In a proper consultation process, you would go around loops like this several times until you have a specification that is just what the user wanted.

ETA it took me 10 minutes to modify non_consecutive() as above. The results look a lot more random now:

Well I can admit it took me longer than 10 minutes, but I am still learning this language (and I made some silly mistakes along the way :( )

I'm not surprised. I've found with these OOP languages that by the time I have found a suitable class library, learned how to use it and how to extend it to do what I want, I could have coded the whole thing from scratch in assembly language several times over. ;)