Hey, what d'ya know... I won!!
Naturally I'm pleased, and would like to pass my thanks to all those involved, and my condolences to Cicero.
I don't have a speech prepared, you'll be glad to hear, nor do I have a mile long list of people to thank!
I have attached a copy of my source, zipped, with a Windows exe. If anyone wants to actually make use of this program, they are more than welcome to (just leave my name in there!), I Also welcome any more comments on it.
As for the comments by the judges, they're all fair and valid, and it's nice to see that all entries were given a fair chance, and were thoroughly examined. I like to know what other people think of my ideas, and this is definately a good way to do it.
The only thing I would like to discuss further is my choice of list. I didn't use a tree because the search facility was designed to check each and every node (it used strstr() to find strings within strings in any given field). If the list was a tree, it would have to traverse all the way to the left doing nothing, then all the way back to the far right, doing compares on each node as it went. Using the link list method, you just start at the beginning and traverse to the end, therefore isn't this faster? I admit that adding a new node would be slower, but as most of the time the user will be searching, rather than adding, I thought link list was the way to go. What do you think?
One bad point about the contest: only 2 entries. I'd have liked to seen more versions of the code to see how else it could have been done. Maybe next time...... Speaking of which, what is it and when?
