Print a spiral, I mean, a diamond

Implementing a diamond spiral in C++

This medium-difficulty coding problem tests your ability to construct a non-standard traversal pattern and map it onto a 2D grid. Rather than the familiar square spiral, you must identify which cells belong to a diamond shape, then number them by walking clockwise inward from the outer ring to the center.

The core challenge is decomposing the problem into two parts: first, determining membership (which cells fall inside the diamond), and second, ordering the traversal so that each ring is visited completely before moving inward. You'll need to manage the changing dimensions and direction of each ring as you spiral, handle the boundary conditions carefully, and ensure the output grid correctly marks cells inside and outside the diamond.

• Diamond boundary conditions and coordinate geometry
• Ring-based traversal and directional state machines
• 2D grid indexing and nested loop bounds
• Handling odd-sized grids and center cells