The way you phrased your original post gave me the impression you were dismissing the constructor solution for the same reason tptacek dismissed the rest. I cer

The way you phrased your original post gave me the impression you were dismissing the constructor solution for the same reason tptacek dismissed the rest. I certainly agree with your point, as you may have read elsewhere in the thread. Other than that, I don't assume a patronizing attitude when I say that arbitrarily labeling solutions to such problems as "cheating" is an infuriatingly useless argument over semantics, and nothing more. Particularly so when such questions are used in the context of a job interview; how would you feel if an interviewer wrongly rejected your answer based on what he read on SO, and whose answer she trusted more? PS. The situations I was referring to is the myriad of such questions on SO; a problem with absurd constraints imposed. They're fun, until 5 people come along and decide going around labeling answers as "cheating". The Stack Overflow meta site has quite a few comments on that phenomenon.