Part 1 went smoothly for me, but I had to take a phone call and will finish part 2 tomorrow finished a bit late. Opening the thread for discussion now.
Part 2 tripped me up because I was imagining some crazy matrix transform but it turned out to be much simpler.
@JeremyGrosser I really like your Coordinate + Direction approach; this makes it very readable. 
(My checks are much less pretty.)
Spent a long time debugging part 2 until I realized you cannot have horizontal or vertical MAS like
.M.
MAS
.S.
Today was a bit mundane. It reminded me of teaching Pascal to first year students. I used a vector of unbounded strings, and then scan in all 8 directions for XMAS. The second assignment was even simpler.
The first week is usually pretty easy… It’s gonna hurt after day 10 
Seems to me that most of the challenges results in a Command Line Interface app.
I’ve done this one just to check if bbt was useful in this context, and it is.
I could build gradually the exe, and pass the test at first try.
One of the test, to give you an idea:
## Scenario example 2
- Given the file `input_ex2`
```
....XXMAS.
.SAMXMS...
...S..A...
..A.A.MS.X
XMASAMX.MM
X.....XA.A
S.S.S.S.SS
.A.A.A.A.A
..M.M.M.MM
.X.X.XMASX
```
- When I run `day_04 XMAS input_ex2`
- Then output contains `Pattern Count = 18`
The complete file is here : Advent_of_code_2024/day_04_tests.md at c31f902a059d783d5359bc75cdad730168be4549 · LionelDraghi/Advent_of_code_2024 · GitHub
My proposal work’s with whatever input size (because I wanted to use all given examples in my test).
And because it was fun, the pattern is a parameter, and I compute the count on the fly on each line. Could work with a couple of tera Bytes on input
But I’m not going to make the second part, my goal was to make a use case for bbt, job done (and it’s 2AM here!)
(incidentally, I found a bug in GNAT)
That’s quite the flex!