Before contributing

Welcome to Data Structures and Algorithms! Before sending your pull requests, make sure that you read the whole guidelines. If you have any doubt on the contributing guide, please feel free to state it clearly in an issue or ask the community in our discord channel.

Contributing

Contributing Guildelines

Click HERE to know how to contribute this Repository

Contributor

We are very happy that you consider implementing algorithms and data structures for others! This repository is referenced and used by learners from all over the globe. Being one of our contributors, you agree and confirm that:

• You did your work - no plagiarism allowed
  • Any plagiarized work will not be merged.

New implementation is welcome! For example, new solutions for a problem, different representations for a graph data structure or algorithm designs with different complexity but identical implementation of an existing implementation is not allowed. Please check whether the solution is already implemented or not before submitting your pull request.

Improving comments and writing proper tests are also highly welcome.

Contribution

We appreciate any contribution, from fixing a grammar mistake in a comment to implementing complex algorithms. Please read this section if you are contributing your work.

Please help us keep our issue list small by adding fixes: #{$ISSUE_NO} to the commit message of pull requests that resolve open issues. GitHub will use this tag to auto-close the issue when the PR is merged.

What is an Algorithm?

An Algorithm is one or more functions (or classes) that:

• take one or more inputs,
• perform some internal calculations or data manipulations,
• return one or more outputs,
• have minimal side effects (Ex. print(), plot(), read(), write()).

Algorithms should be packaged in a way that would make it easy for readers to put them into larger programs.

Algorithms should:

• have intuitive class and function names that make their purpose clear to readers
• use Python or C++ naming conventions and intuitive variable names to ease comprehension
• be flexible to take different input values
• have Python type hints for their input parameters and return values if using Python
• raise Python exceptions (ValueError, etc.) on erroneous input values if using Python
• have docstrings with clear explanations and/or URLs to source materials if using Python and comments if using CPP
• return all calculation results instead of printing or plotting them

Algorithms in this repo should not be how-to examples for existing Python packages. Instead, they should perform internal calculations or manipulations to convert input values into different output values. Those calculations or manipulations can use data types, classes, or functions of existing Python packages but each algorithm in this repo should add unique value.

Coding Style

We want your work to be readable by others; therefore, we encourage you to note the following:

• If you are using Python, then please write in Python 3.9+. For instance: print() is a function in Python 3 so print "Hello" will not work but print("Hello") will.
• Please focus hard on the naming of functions, classes, and variables. Help your reader by using descriptive names that can help you to remove redundant comments.
  • Single letter variable names are old school so please avoid them unless their life only spans a few lines.
  • Expand acronyms because gcd() is hard to understand but greatest_common_divisor() is not.
  • Please follow the Python Naming Conventions or Cpp Naming Conventions

Other Requirements for Submissions

• If you are submitting code in the project_euler/ directory, please also read the dedicated Guideline before contributing to our Project Euler library.
• The file extension for code files should be .py or .cpp
• Strictly use snake_case (underscore_separated) in your file_name, as it will be easy to parse in future using scripts.

Contributors