:-) I don't write in Norm here: different context different rules
Also... shortly after I learned the existence of sprintf and refactored to a much better version

uuuh ... why so ?

to suffer more :-P
and write as explicitly as possible, never initializing a variable on the same line it's declared and stuff like that

it was an inside joke because we attended together a school where we couldn't use for loops but only while loops, so that's the "forbidden function" :-P anyway my solution is crap because it wouldn't scale up to more than 2 digits