A few things. Firstly, thanks for being constructive. Your points are noted, although I don't necessarily agree with all of them. To me, "some people" does n

A few things. Firstly, thanks for being constructive. Your points are noted, although I don't necessarily agree with all of them. To me, "some people" does not imply strictly more than one. That's possibly a mathematician thing. But the point about mixing implementation detail and interface requirements, this is normal in much of the coding I do. I'm often working in a constrained environment, and performance requirements are very much a part of the specification. Stating that something must happen "in place" is a common requirement for me, and goes beyond saying "must not malloc" or whatever. More, it's having someone being able to cope with the mix that I was, in part, looking for. I'm also well aware that many of the people here on HN do big machine programming, or web programming, and aren't accustomed to constrained programming. That's partly why I chose this particular question. My next challenge won't have that sort of constraint, and will be more in line with your comments. (Yes, sucker that I am, I'm planning another small exercise by way of comparison/contrast). And again, these are the sorts of questions that I would expect to discuss during the de-brief. The very fact that you bring them up at all means you are in the top 0.01% of programmers (for some value of 0.01).