I'm really amazed at the variation I'm seeing in the solutions that just my friends are providing. One said his first try would be quadratic, and his second wo

I'm really amazed at the variation I'm seeing in the solutions that just my friends are providing. One said his first try would be quadratic, and his second would require allocation; another used a strange mix of indexing and pointer arithmetic. Even those who commit to either indexing or pointer arithmetic have significant variation in their solutions. I actually think there's a distinct best solution to this problem, so it's remarkable to me that there's so much variation between people that I consider to be good programmers.