Re: OT programming challenge: fastest/best/shortest C program to jumble a sentence, then restore it

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.