padpowell@wateng.UUCP (PAD Powell [Admin]) (10/28/83)
The other day I came upon a neat little programming question for
Ph.d. comprehensives. The challenge is to write it in C,
and to come up with an algorithm to do it with the least number
of character moves.
Question:
Given 3 strings, stored sequentially, arrange them in lexigraphical
order. It can be assumed that the strings are seqences of ascii
characters, terminated by a "null" or 0 character.
No extra memory may be used. (Note: by this, the examiners meant
that you could use the MALLOC things).
For example, the data structure defining the strings could have the
form:
char *Table[] = {
"first",
"second",
"last string" };
reorder( (char *)(Table) );
This should result in:
"first", "last string", "second"
I waded into this little problem, thinking that there was nothing to it.
Warnings:
1. Handle null string.
2. Watch out for strings with different lengths. (I goofed this.)
3. You can assume that there is only a single "0" between strings.
Patrick ("I Hates UNIX Hacks and C Programmers Forever") Powell