They first sent me two programming questions to solve by email before anything else, and supposedly, they are always the same questions. I am a hundred percent sure that I solved both of them really well, as they are fairly easy. However, after sending them in, they simply said, "Thank you for your effort, but we cannot proceed any further at this moment."

Given a string, write a routine that converts the string to a long, without using the built-in functions that would do this. Describe what (if any) limitations the code has.

Implement insert and delete in a tri-nary tree. A tri-nary tree is much like a binary tree but with three child nodes for each parent instead of two -- with the left node being values less than the parent, the right node values greater than the parent, and the middle node values equal to the parent.