twice collected by me now, curiouser and curiouser.

Should I include that test case (which would then invalidate all other solutions) or change the description to exclude it

Oops lol

Thanks

I don't want to be that guy, but...

"represetations" -> "representations"

That's fine, it could have gone either way. Since no action was taken in 5 months, I made a final decision.

I actually disagree with the portability reasoning. Lots of languages have arbitrary precision ints these days.

Approved with current format to allow portability to a multitude of languages.

I haven't actually solved, so in this case a binary string may even actually be appropriate.

Strings are generally suspect, but there are always exceptions.

For translations to different languages, perhaps the current format is more suitable.

I thought |n| means the absolute value of n, but fine

Marking as resolved if no further issues

|n| means the length of n as a binary string is less than or equal to 10^5. This doesnt guarentee that it can be expressee as an integer in Python

It only works both ways by chance that second case. You need to take into account every possible way of removing pairs. The expected value is the one which is alphabetically the smallest (left to right). "czab" < "zacb". But remember, the remaining characters still need to maintain their original order. Characters cannot "jump" over other ones.

ywbye