Neither best practice or clever. Same goes for the other solutions which are highly rated.

Solutions yes, but comments are visible in the homepage when not marked as having spoiler content. That's why you should use it here too.

Aren't solutions only visible to whoever unlocks solutions? Why do we need a spoiler flag in a page full of solutions?

Please use spoiler flag next time.

I guess yeah. But when building thousands of lines applications, I strongly doubt you can focus on micro-optimization rather than code structure without losing the maintainability.

Probably you supposed I had particular goals doing this but actually I have different goals.

I participated in the coding contest where 10-20% optimisation was not considered 'micro'. It's even crucial since there were time and memory limits for the code execution.

Also 10-20% difference is crucial for production code. So with these very simple tasks I learn not the fundamentals, but the basic efficiency.

P.S. From another perspective, advice could be to stop unnecessary micro-complication. I strongly believe that if smth can be achieved in 5 steps - there is not so many reasons to achieve it in 6 or more steps. Yes, for these simple tasks and tests - it doesn't matter, I agree. But in the long run - it is important. Anyway, it really depends on personal point of view, goals and values

advise: stop focusing on micro-optimizations performances... You mostly won't get anything useful out of this for a day to day usage.

DEL

How is this 8kyu??
I'm new to code and this solution is definitely way above my skill level.

The list is sorted. I think you can avoid using the set.

Wow, I didn't know that the max function had this optional 'default' parameter!

please can you explain the logic behind this. it looks really clever