Alternative to nested for-loop in Delphi - delphi

Question

I came across the following (conceptually very simple) problem, and want to write code to do it, but am struggling. Let's say we have two rows of equal length, k. Each cell of each row can be either a 0 or a 1.
For e.g., consider the following row-pair, with k = 5: 01011, 00110
Now if the two rows could freely exchange values at each cell, there would be 2^5 possible combinations of row-pairs (some of which may not be unique). For instance, we could have 00010, 01111 as one possible row-pair from the above data. I want to write code in Delphi to list all the possible row-pairs. This is easy enough to do with a set of nested for-loops. However, if the value of k is known only at run-time, I'm not sure how I can use this approach for I don't know how many index variables I would need. I can't see how case statements will help either because I don't know the value of k.
I am hoping that there is an alternative to a nested for-loop, but any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Given two vectors A and B of length k, we can generate a new pair of vectors A1 and B1 by selectively choosing elements from A or B. Let our decision to choose from A or B be dictated by a bit vector S, also of length k. For i in [0..k), when Si is 0, store Ai in A1i and Bi in B1i. If Si is 1, then vice versa.
We can define that in Delphi with a function like this:
procedure GeneratePair(const A, B: string; S: Cardinal; out A1, B1: string);
var
k: Cardinal;
i: Cardinal;
begin
Assert(Length(A) = Length(B));
k := Length(A);
Assert(k <= 32);
SetLength(A1, k);
SetLength(B1, k);
for i := 1 to k do
if (S and (1 shl Pred(i))) = 0 then begin
A1[i] := A[i];
B1[i] := B[i];
end else begin
A1[i] := B[i];
B1[i] := A[i];
end;
end;
If we count in binary from 0 to 2k−1, that will give us a sequence of bit vectors representing all the possible combinations of exchanging or not-exchanging characters between A and B.
We can write a loop and use the above function to generate all 2k combinations:
A := '01011';
B := '00110';
for S := 0 to Pred(Round(IntPower(2, Length(A)))) do begin
GeneratePair(A, B, S, A1, B1);
writeln(A1, ', ', B1);
end;
That effectively uses one set of nested loops. The outer loop is the one from 0 to 31. The inner loop is the one inside the function from 1 to k. As you can see, we don't need to know the value of k in advance.

Answer 2

Now that, thanks to Rob, I understand the problem, I offer this recursive solution:
{$APPTYPE CONSOLE}
procedure Swap(var A, B: Char);
var
temp: Char;
begin
temp := A;
A := B;
B := temp;
end;
procedure Generate(const A, B: string; Index: Integer);
var
A1, B1: string;
begin
Assert(Length(A)=Length(B));
inc(Index);
if Index>Length(A) then // termination
Writeln(A, ', ', B)
else
begin // recurse
// no swap
Generate(A, B, Index);
//swap
A1 := A;
B1 := B;
Swap(A1[Index], B1[Index]);
Generate(A1, B1, Index);
end;
end;
begin
Generate('01011', '00110', 0);
Readln;
end.