Kata solutions teach me more than any reading I have ever come across

Well it is not super unrealistic as this code could be run under the Win16 API on a 32-bit Windows system (or an old DOS machine), which only has 16-bit ints.

Will not work if the number of identical characters causes an int overflow, +1

Не будет работать, если количество одинаковых символов вызовет переполнение int, +1

wow

hint

Funny why I never think of this. Nice One!

yeah me too

There is no need to copy the whole string (not to mention copying the word a second time).

There seem to be a lot of string copies in this. Why not just do the allocation and copy once, when you've found the largest-scoring word?

If n is negative (i.e., < 0) then the for loop will simply fail to execute since the condition "i < n+1" will be false (as i is set to 1 initially, any negative number + 1 can never be > 1).
Now, the value of s is not altered and is returned as such (i.e., 0).