Maximum Ice Cream Bars - Solution & Explanation

This approach involves sorting the array of costs to ensure the boy buys the cheapest available ice cream bars first. After sorting, iterate through the list and keep buying bars until you run out of coins.

Steps involve:

• Sort the array of costs.
• Iterate through the sorted costs array, and for each cost, check if it can be bought with the remaining coins.
• Accumulate the cost and increase the count if it can be bought, otherwise break out of the loop.

This C program sorts the costs array using qsort and calculates the maximum number of ice creams that can be bought while iterating through the sorted array. It returns the count of ice creams the boy can afford.

This solution uses a variation of counting sort suitable for this specific problem due to the constraint that costs[i] <= 100,000.

Steps involve:

• Using a frequency array to count occurrences of prices in the costs array.
• Iterate over the frequency array, and decrement coins while counting how many ice creams can be bought at each price using the accumulated frequency.

This Python solution uses a frequency array to store the number of each cost. By iterating over these costs in order (with known max cost), it calculates how many bars of each cost can be purchased and subtracts the respective cost from the available coins, tallying the total ice creams bought.