[Exercise Approaches]: Audit/Cleanup of Track Approaches 2025

[BethanyG]

This is a tracking issue for existing approaches on the Python track
Related forum thread for general discussion

During discussion on this Forum Post, @petrem volunteered to audit the Python track approaches for the following:

• Spelling, grammar, typos
• Python syntax
• Clarity of writing & explanation
• Readability and maintainability
• White space
• Other Exercism markdown specifications as needed
• Possible missing/additional approaches (noted as TODOs of future work)

See the table of existing/in progress/missing approaches below. Exercises with one ✅ are unaudited, exercises with two ✅ ✅ have been reviewed, changed and merged. highlighted exercises are in review.

Exercises without checkmarks or PRs do not yet have approaches. If you want to work on an exercise that is missing an approach, please check in with the maintainers to avoid conflicting with others who may be working on things.

Completed?	Exercise Name
✅	Acronym
	Affine Cipher
IN PROGRESS (PR 3652)	All Your Base
	Allergies
	Alphametics
	Anagram
	Armstrong Numbers
✅	Atbash Cipher
	Bank Account
	Binary Search Tree
	Binary Search
✅	Bob
	Book Store
	Bottle Song
	Bowling
	Change
✅	Circular Buffer
	Clock
✅	Collatz Conjecture
	Complex Numbers
	Connect
	Crypto Square
✅	Darts
	Diamond
	Difference Of Squares
	Diffie Hellman
IN PROGRESS (PR #3666)	Dnd Character
	Dominoes
	Dot Dsl
IN PROGRESS (PR 3378)	Etl
	Flatten Array
	Food Chain
	Forth
IN PROGRESS (PR 3772)	Gigasecond
	Go Counting
	Grade School
✅	Grains
	Grep
✅	Hamming
	Hangman
	High Scores
	House
	Isbn Verifier
✅	Isogram
	Kindergarten Garden
	Knapsack
	Largest Series Product
✅	Leap
	Ledger
	Linked List
	List Ops
✅	Luhn
	Markdown
	Matching Brackets
	Matrix
	Meetup
IN PROGRESS (PR 3935)	Flower Field (Minesweeper)
✅	Nth Prime
	Ocr Numbers
	Paasio
✅	Palindrome Products
✅	Pangram
	Perfect Numbers
	Phone Number
✅	Pig Latin
	Poker
	Pov
	Prime Factors
	Protein Translation
	Proverb
	Pythagorean Triplet
	Queen Attack
	Rail Fence Cipher
✅	Raindrops
	Rational Numbers
	React
	Rectangles
	Resistor Color Trio
	Resistor Color Duo
	Resistor Color
	Rest Api
✅	Reverse String
✅✅ (PR #4052 )	Rna Transcription
✅✅ (PR #4051 )	Robot Name
	Robot Simulator
✅	Roman Numerals
✅	Rotational Cipher
	Run Length Encoding
	Saddle Points
	Satellite
	Say
	Scale Generator
✅	Scrabble Score
	Secret Handshake
	Series
	Sgf Parsing
✅	Sieve
	Simple Cipher
	Simple Linked List
	Space Age
	Spiral Matrix
✅	Sublist
IN PROGRESS (PR 3375)	Sum Of Multiples
	Tournament
	Transpose
	Tree Building
	Triangle
	Twelve Days
	Two Bucket
	Two Fer
	Variable Length Quantity
IN PROGRESS (PR 3371)	Word Count
	Word Search
✅	Wordy
✅	Yacht
	Zebra Puzzle
	Zipper

[petrem]

General question regarding quotes, following discussion in in previous PR: besides checking for consistency (using either simple or double quotes), should reviews also switch to single quotes, even if otherwise consistent?

The change is relatively easy to do, but long-term consistency is probably difficult to maintain without tooling support.

[BethanyG]

I hesitate to do a mass conversion. Maybe its just me - but the thought of embarking on that "quest", even with tooling support feels like inviting disaster. Too many instances where context could be missed, or readability hurt.

But I'd be open to hearing arguments both pro and con, and agree that a tool would be better for enforcement. Any thoughts or recommendations?

My first impulse is to use something like prettier (it has a single quote rule) either offline or as part of CI. Although we'd have to be careful. Something like Black does the opposite, and cannot be configured otherwise. But I have not done any digging for alternates to those recently.

Right now, we use Black to format the test files that are auto-generated from problem specs, but we don't use it other places. It's default configuration utterly munges the readability of files like the set concept exercise data files, and AFAK any data structure that's long or dense. But let me stop before this becomes a rant.....

[BethanyG]

I should chime in here with the Emerson quote via PEP8 chestnut: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". 😉 -- because I just remembered one important exception. Docstrings always have double quotes for readability. So there is that as well. Sigh.