Codility: Passing cars in Lua - lua

Question

I'm currently practicing programming problems and out of interest, I'm trying a few Codility exercises in Lua. I've been stuck on the Passing Cars problem for a while.
Problem:
A non-empty zero-indexed array A consisting of N integers is given. The consecutive elements of array A represent consecutive cars on a road.
Array A contains only 0s and/or 1s:
0 represents a car traveling east,
1 represents a car traveling west.
The goal is to count passing cars. We say that a pair of cars (P, Q), where 0 ≤ P < Q < N, is passing when P is traveling to the east and Q is traveling to the west.
For example, consider array A such that:
A[0] = 0
A[1] = 1
A[2] = 0
A[3] = 1
A[4] = 1
We have five pairs of passing cars: (0, 1), (0, 3), (0, 4), (2, 3), (2, 4).
Write a function:
function solution(A)
that, given a non-empty zero-indexed array A of N integers, returns the number of pairs of passing cars.
The function should return −1 if the number of pairs of passing cars exceeds 1,000,000,000.
For example, given:
A[0] = 0
A[1] = 1
A[2] = 0
A[3] = 1
A[4] = 1
the function should return 5, as explained above.
Assume that:
N is an integer within the range [1..100,000];
each element of array A is an integer that can have one of the following values: 0, 1.
Complexity:
expected worst-case time complexity is O(N);
expected worst-case space complexity is O(1), beyond input storage (not counting the storage required for input arguments).
Elements of input arrays can be modified.
My attempt in Lua keeps failing but I can't seem to find the issue.
local function solution(A)
local zeroes = 0
local pairs = 0
for i = 1, #A do
if A[i] == 0 then
zeroes = zeroes + 1
else
pairs = pairs + zeroes
if pairs > 1e9 then
return -1
end
end
end
return pairs
end
In terms of time-space complexity constraints, I think it should pass so I can't seem to find the issue. What am I doing wrong? Any advice or tips to make my code more efficient would be appreciated.
FYI: I keep getting a result of 2 when the desired example result is 5.

Answer 1

The problem statement says A is 0-based so if we ignore the first and start at 1, the output would be 2 instead of 5. 0-based tables should be avoided in Lua, they go against convention and will lead to a lot of off-by one errors: for i=1,#A do will not do what you want.
function solution1based(A)
local zeroes = 0
local pairs = 0
for i = 1, #A do
if A[i] == 0 then
zeroes = zeroes + 1
else
pairs = pairs + zeroes
if pairs > 1e9 then
return -1
end
end
end
return pairs
end
print(solution1based{0, 1, 0, 1, 1}) -- prints 5 as you wanted
function solution0based(A)
local zeroes = 0
local pairs = 0
for i = 0, #A do
if A[i] == 0 then
zeroes = zeroes + 1
else
pairs = pairs + zeroes
if pairs > 1e9 then
return -1
end
end
end
return pairs
end
print(solution0based{[0]=0, [1]=1, [2]=0, [3]=1, [4]=1}) -- prints 5