title: Algorithm to determine coin combinations
body: <p>I was recently faced with a prompt for a programming algorithm that I had no idea what to do for. I've never really written an algorithm before, so I'm kind of a newb at this.</p>
  
  <p>The problem said to write a program to determine all of the possible coin combinations for a cashier to give back as change based on coin values and number of coins. For example, there could be a currency with 4 coins: a 2 cent, 6 cent, 10 cent and 15 cent coins. How many combinations of this that equal 50 cents are there?</p>
  
  <p>The language I'm using is C++, although that doesn't really matter too much.</p>
  
  <p>edit: This is a more specific programming question, but how would I analyze a string in C++ to get the coin values? They were given in a text document like</p>
  
  <pre><code>4 2 6 10 15 50 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>(where the numbers in this case correspond to the example I gave)</p>