"This is good, ..."

Thanks.

"... but can be considerably simplified"

Agreed.

I normally check an OP's home node before replying. If it's a first post, I add a welcome greeting. In this case, it was a second post. The first post was stated to be homework.

On that basis, I intentionally went with a longer piece of code than I might do normally. I had meant to add a comment that the code could be simplified: clearly, I forgot to do that.

Perhaps, fidda will tell us which was the more useful.