Huh? I'm aware that there can be benefits to looping backwards. There can also be (cache-related) drawbacks. "It's post-increment so it runs for i=0" is probab

Huh? I'm aware that there can be benefits to looping backwards. There can also be (cache-related) drawbacks. "It's post-increment so it runs for i=0" is probably exactly what I meant, you needed to use post-decrement (not increment) since otherwise it would break. Of course it can be re-written like you did now, but then you added the >= 0 part which was implicit in your first comment. Its omission made it important to pick post-decrement or it would break on an empty string just as I said. My entire point was that it's beyond most beginners to rely on fairly subtle things like that. Not sure why you're so condescending, I certainly didn't try to call you a beginner, it was the other way around: your code was not very beginner-esque, but the original article was about how a C beginner might write a simple loop and be surprised.