Whats missing from an SRM?
Before I took part in my first TopCoder competition I visited many of the practice rooms and studied the solutions of other competitors. My first reaction (being an teacher) was “What’s up with these variable names? Where are the comments?”. I shortly realized that no points were awarded for conforming to coding standards. One letter variable names take less time to type than more descriptive ones. Comments only help others during the challenge phase. On the other hand, the mindset of a professional programmer must be that code is written once to be read many times. An effective SRM solution is written once to be tested shortly thereafter. As I write production code I tend to ask myself if I’ll be able to understand it in 6 months. I understand that I’ll often be required to revisit it. My employees labor under the same expectations. None of us wants our cell phone to ring on Sunday morning because something we wrote is dividing by zero. If such a problem does arise, however, it’s comf
