It was hard to understate the purpose

Thanks, that's fixed it. I must have missed the comment.

-- sort results by area ascending, then volume ascending, then width ascending, then height ascending

you are not doing that in your current solution. note that in ORDER BY , the order in which you write the different sorting criteria matters

In SQL there may be an issue with ordering - I'm pretty sure I have the correct answer but the ordering logic is opaque to me. No matter which ordering logic I choose, it won't accept my answer.

Approved by someone

Approved

Lua translation !

I mean, it's not that there is a thousand of ways to write two formulas after all?

For me most answears look like chatgpt copy paste.

C Translation (author inactive).

nice kata

Nice Kata, thank you.
Maybe in the instructions you should be more clear. Explicitly ask for the "Surface Area".
In the current description you're asking for the area, which can be misleading because:

Area = 2 dimensional calculation

Surface Area = 3 dimensional calculation

The description should specify that it's looking for total surface area of the box.

I disagree, if you're asked to calculate the area of the box, it's implicit it's the total area, and not the area of the base, it's a 3D element after all, why would you only calculate the area of one side? Anyway, if adding total before area makes it clearer, go for it.

I see, I did not notice that description for SQL is so different from other languages.

I will try to improve the description.

The description should specify that it's looking for total surface area of the box. That's what it says in eg python, and it caused me (and evidently others) confusion for SQL that it just says area. (I, like someone else in the comments, thought that area meant the area of the base of the box)