AoC 2020 - Day 7: Handy Haversacks

This time, we started with trees.
The first part was essentially the number of (sub) trees containing a specific leaf, while the second a normal traversal.

For the first, I decided to use a shortcut, and just check the string itself.
This had the main advantage of not forcing to parse the second half of the rule. I was pretty sure that the second part of the exercise would have asked to do that, but after yesterday’s experience decided to go for the easiest approach also because it would not have caused any additional “debt”.

This approach also had the advantage of validating the second part: by swapping the second half implementation, from a string to a dictionary, I was able to quickly validate the parsing. As a side effect, the second approach was noticeably faster – this is not something I expected, being all short strings.