Programming Praxis

My statistics always decline in the summer, but they are starting to pick up, so I guess school must be starting in some places. Here’s a simple homework problem for beginning programmers:

Given an unsorted array of integers, find the smallest number in the array, the largest number in the array, and the smallest number between the two array bounds that is not in the array. For instance, given the array [-1, 4, 5, -23, 24], the smallest number is -23, the largest number is 24, and the smallest number between the array bounds is -22. You may assume the input is well-formed.

Your task is to provide two solutions to the problem, the first a straight forward solution that a beginning programmer might write, and a second solution that is rather more “creative;” feel free to define creative however you wish. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

Pages: 1 2