Converting Python app to C++ completely

[Roy Smith]

Joe Knapka  <jknapka at earthlink.nospam> wrote:
> You might try rewriting it in Python, using lists of characters
> instead of strings for the stuff that's causing performance
> trouble. Given str, lst = list(str), then do all the processing
> (in place) on lst, and ''.join(lst) to turn it back into a string.

An interesting idea, I'll try it!

The only problem is, I really had two reasons for converting it
in the first place.  One was to improve performance, the other was to
learn C++.  If I solve the first problem in Python, I won't solve the
second problem at all :-(