Programming Praxis

This one is tricky:

Given a list of events with arrival and departure times, write a program that determines the time at which the greatest number events occurred.

For instance, you may have ten employees who arrived at work and departed at the times shown below (for instance, employee 9 arrived at 12:00noon and departed at 5:00pm):

employee   1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10
          -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
arrival   10 12 11 13 14 12  9 14 12 10
departure 15 14 17 15 15 16 13 15 17 18

Then the maximum employee count was at 2:00pm:

 9 |                    7          | 1
10 |  1                 7       10 | 3
11 |  1     3           7       10 | 4
12 |  1  2  3        6  7     9 10 | 7
13 |  1  2  3  4     6  7     9 10 | 8
14 |  1  2  3  4  5  6     8  9 10 | 9
15 |  1     3  4  5  6     8  9 10 | 8
16 |        3        6        9 10 | 4
17 |        3                 9 10 | 3
18 |                            10 | 1

There were 9 employees at work at time 14.

Your task is to write a program that determines the start and end times of the time block where the greatest number of events occurred. 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.

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