UVa 11933: Splitting Numbers problem summary: Given a number n, print out a and b, where a is the number constructed from every other set bit of n and b is constructed from the other half of the set bits. This problem is simple to implement, but in my case I screwed the implementation up and made things a lot harder for myself. The source of my pain was an overflow error, and I learned that there is a difference between this:

and this:

In the first snippet, 1<<i is of type int, and overflows when i>=31. In the second snippet, care is taken to explicitly cast 1 to type long long, so the result of the bitshift is also a long long and we’re good!

When I read the problem description, I saw that the input was guaranteed to be less than 2^31 - 1, and I immediately assumed that overflow wouldn’t be an issue. I wrote my solution using ints, and for input larger than 2^30, the overflow error described above occurred, resulting in an infinite loop and a mysterious TL verdict. What’s worse, this took me the better part of an hour to debug because of my incorrect assumption. I think the moral is: Always test on the largest input!

My solution: