My son, now 25, was a McNuggets fan. Can you blame him? They’re delicious. He’s always been into numbers and puzzles, so I introduced him to the McNuggets problem when he was about 10.

This classic puzzle was a fun way to keep him occupied and teach him programming. The problem is simple: McDonald’s used to sell Chicken McNuggets in 6, 9, and 20 packs. What is the largest number of McNuggets you cannot buy using these package sizes?

Back to the basics with basic

Let’s say for a moment that we’ve got an ordered list of numbers.

1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,21,23,25

There are 13 values here and we want to check if the number 25 is in this list.

One way to do this would be to loop over each element in the list and check to see if it matches what we’re looking for.

In BASIC, we’d do something like

I was recently on a video call with a friend, throwing around some ideas for a new product. I mentioned adding large signed numbers in assembly and using two’s complement. He asked me what two’s complement was. I was a little surprised that he didn’t know. He’s been a Java programmer for more than 30 years. Java and Python programmers (and others like gasp Commodore / MicroSoft BASIC) don’t have a native unsigned integer type. The language takes care of the details for you.