Agreed. The recursion has to be killing their time. My code is about 35% faster than theirs. I don't understand bitwise operators yet. My code and yours run neck and neck.

It seems like you should be able to shave some time off of yours by changing your for loop to somehow account for the actual bit size of 'n' instead of using 32 bits regardless of 'n'. A little above my grasp thus far in my coding journey.

ahahahahahahahahahahaha

How many lines is this?

This is huge.

It's not perfect, I didn't know the art of string formatting in c# as well as I should.

hardly! look at these other solutions

I thought about doing this at first, but I wasn's sure how to whittle it down this small

Yeah, not sure why this has more "best practice"s than "clever". because it's definitely not what you should do unless it's code golf.

so that's just weird haha

it's terrible, I know.

When simplicity matters more than memory or repetition...
This would not scale any further than 99 and realistically should never be done with an accepted range more than 20.