The interview was for an entry-level role, but was quite technical. There was no HR nonsense, like stating my greatest weakness. The interview was more like an Oxbridge tutorial: one-on-one, with guidance when I got stuck. The intent was more to discover how I think and solve problems, and not if I could regurgitate all sorting algorithms invented by humankind (though sorting-related issues did come up as an aside). As such, the interview was language-agnostic.

Given a file containing a sorted list of integers (one per line), what are the major design considerations for a program that would check if the list contains a specific integer?

Describe the program's execution step by step.

Discuss the binary search algorithm and its computational complexity.