Comment by davidst

This really brings back memories. 25 years ago I used (what was then) the undocumented variation in the itoa() routine for the Borland C run-time library. The purpose was to eliminate the need for a 16-byte table to generate hex codes when base-16 output was desired. itoa() was a part of the printf() library so this table became embedded in virtually every executable. Knocking that out was a meaningful size optimization in those days.