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From: rbowman <bowman@montana.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: OT programming challenge: fastest/best/shortest C program to
 jumble a sentence, then restore it
Date: 9 Mar 2024 03:14:10 GMT
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On Fri, 8 Mar 2024 15:41:13 -0500, DFS wrote:

> Sorry.  That's ALL from a crlf inserted by the newsreader.  It compiled
> cleanly after I took it out.

Yup...

In production code I'd likely do

char* sentence;

sentence = strdup("Once you try it, you'll see it doesn't need spice.");
if (sentence == NULL) {
    printf("strdup() failed: %s", strerror(errno));
    return -1;
}

Admittedly is the implied malloc() failed the odds of it printing anything 
aren't great but might as well try. I probably would use strtok_r() in 
production if there was a remote possibility that there would be another 
nested strtok(). That's ruined more than one programmer's day.

It does make one appreciate Python when you're not scrambling for the last 
nanosecond. I recently came across an article about MicroPython on the 
Pico by someone who hung a logic analyzer on an output. The first 
observation was

def Blink():
   While True:
       pin.on()
       pin.off()

Blink()


was faster than an in-line 

While True:
   pin.on()
   pin.off()

The second observation was if you were working with nanoseconds it was 
time to move to C. No surprise on the second but apparently the generated 
code is a little better optimized in a function.