rna-transcription: don't transcribe both ways

[kytrinyx]

I can't remember the history of this, but we ended up with a weird non-biological thing in the RNA transcription exercise, where some test suites also have tests for transcribing from RNA back to DNA. This makes no sense.

If this track does have tests for the reverse transcription, we should remove them, and also simplify the reference solution to match.

If this track doesn't have any tests for RNA->DNA transcription, then this issue can be closed.

See exercism/problem-specifications#148

[chezwicker]

I always thought this made sense from the programming side even if it's nonsense in terms of biology: it makes sure the solution doesn't hard code values but abstracts by e.g. defining source -> target "maps" that can be passed to the algo used.

I would value this more than consistency with reality. Maybe we could rephrase and state that sometimes we find isolated RNA and want to know what DNA strand it resulted from...

On 7 Apr 2016, at 03:58, Katrina Owen notifications@github.com wrote:

I can't remember the history of this, but we ended up with a weird non-biological thing in the RNA transcription exercise, where some test suites also have tests for transcribing from RNA back to DNA. This makes no sense.

If this track does have tests for the reverse transcription, we should remove them, and also simplify the reference solution to match.

If this track doesn't have any tests for RNA->DNA transcription, then this issue can be closed.

See exercism/problem-specifications#148

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[kytrinyx]

Yeah, rephrasing it would work. I don't have a strong opinion. I didn't think about the fact that reversing it would avoid hard-coding, that's a good reason to keep the reverse algorithm. Would you mind making that point in the original/top-level thread?

[chezwicker]

Sure, will do!

[kytrinyx]

When you decide to update the description, then go ahead and copy the description.md file from problem-specifications to exercises/rna-transcription/.meta/description.md and update it here. Thanks!