Programming Praxis

These three questions come from Career Cup:

First: A kidnapper wants to write a ransom note by cutting characters from the text of a magazine. Given two strings containing the characters of the ransom note and the characters of the magazine, write a program to determine if the ransom note can be formed from the magazine.

Second: Write a program that operates in linear time that finds the item in a list that appears the most times consecutively.

Third: Given two finite streams of integers that are too large to fit in memory, write a program that finds the integers that appear in both streams; it must operate in time linear in the length of the longer of the two streams.

Your task is to write the three programs described above. 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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