zlacker

>>jstrie+(OP)
> As a result, solutions using strings are disallowed on problem sets and quizzes until they are taught. However, the few students who have prior Python programming experience may be tempted to find digit length without loops using a variant of the following (for our purposes) invalid solution.

Wow. this is one of the reasons I hated school. No programmatic reason what given for why a string solution couldnt be used, only an arbitrary reason. Here students may have knowledge from self teaching or whatever, but they are unallowed to use that knowledge because "reasons".

To any teacher that thinks its a good idea to punish students for thinking outside the box: shame on you. All youre going to end up doing is crushing enthusiasm and/or creating drones. Please dont.

>>svnpen+Jm
I don't know about this. This feels like cheating rather than thinking outside of the box. Like when you ask a student to implement a vector in C++, instead of writing the code the student makes a wrapper around std::vector. Internally, `str` probably also use some equivalent of the naive solution implemented somewhere to convert a integer to its decimal string.

>>hechan+iq
Using math.log10 seems at least as cheating to me. (though to be clear, I'd accept both if it were me)