New exercise: palindrome-products, include error handling?

Programming WebAssembly
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1

I am currently preparing this exercise for wasm; I wondered if I should include the error handling (minFactor > maxFactor) and how the return value should look like then (e.g. -1 product or negative factors offset).

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If we are returning a product and an offset/length, we could return -1 as the “product”. The example solution could return 0 as offset/length. For this exercise, Rust treats no result and error the same way:

Also possible would be using -1 and -2 to distinguish the situations.

WASM all-your-base uses a separate status-code result, this would be yet another option.

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I dislike having an additional status code when there are already three then unused values. Also, an empty list of factors already shows there is no product.

So after a bit of deliberation, I prefer

  • value: positive number, factors offset, factors length > 0: normal solution
  • value: zero, factors offset irrelevant, length 0: no palindrome product found
  • value: -1, factors offset irrelevant, length 0: min > max

Obviously, this should be documented in instructions.append.md.

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