A public relations problem

A public relations problem

A quick Internet survey of implementations in other languages demonstrates my point.

There's a 76 line C implementation and a related 63 line Java implementation. The large number of lines reflect that both C and Java are lacking in their native support for high-level list and string operations.

I struggled to find an idiomatic C++ implementation (found plenty of "C in C++" style implementations), though I did find one using Boost (39 lines).

With C# we're finally getting somewhere; it can be done in 7 lines, plus a 17 line utility class that really ought to be in the standard library (but isn't). (C# in general seems to be a good fit if one wants a statically typed, compiled and managed language with a level of expressiveness that approaches Python.)

Again, I'm sure that an experienced C/C++/Java developer could do it in fewer lines than the above, but according to Google, those examples are the best the Internet has to offer. Google also finds several Python implementations, all of them variations on the same 5 lines as I posted above. (I guess there's only one obvious way to do it.)