If you didn't notice, their version was based off of static allocation for the character array, which is the kind of thing a sharp C programmer will put in as a

If you didn't notice, their version was based off of static allocation for the character array, which is the kind of thing a sharp C programmer will put in as an optimization. Note that the Python version is already pretty optimized, according to general Python idioms. You are arguing that they should have compared against a less efficient C example, which honestly boggles my mind.