When the waitress asks how I like my eggs, I answer, “Cooked.”
O, how we all laugh . . .
The humor here is that it’s assumed you desire your eggs to be cooked and the waitress’s question relates to the fashion by which the eggs are to be cooked: fried, over-easy, sunny-side-up, scrambled, poached, and on and on. But the question of cooked or raw also applies to standard input for a computer terminal.
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The challenge for this month’s Exercise is to generate three random values and determine if they work as sides of a valid triangle. To make this determination, you must consider three types of triangles and test the generated values for each.
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As data is read from a file, a file position indicator (which most C references call a “file pointer”) moves sequentially through the file’s data. As a review, three functions are available to adjust this offset:
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Back in October, the C programming Exercise was to code Heron’s Formula. The challenge required the user to input three values, one for each side of the triangle. But, as I learned since, a triangle must have specific side length ratios for it to be a valid triangle.
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By combining the code page 437 data from last week’s Lesson into my colorful hexdump utility, I’m finally able to wrap up the code and produce a program that outputs a more interesting file dump.
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The one common denominator in the microcomputer era was ASCII. These 128 codes (zero through 127) provided a modicum of consistency for text files shared between the abundant computer platforms from days of yore. But a byte (char) holds 256 values. So what was done about those non-ASCII character codes, 128 through 255?
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Updating the hexdump utility with color is good, but adding wide characters for output is even better. From last week’s Lesson, I’m adding wide character output to generate codes for non-printing ASCII values 0 through 31 and 127.
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The task for this month’s Exercise is to write a function, greatest(), that returns the largest of three values. While this task could be done easily with an if-else construction, the second part of the challenge is to write the entire thing as a single ternary statement. How’d you do?
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The hexdump utility is a marvelous tool for grabbing a sneak peek at a file’s innards, especially when debugging code that performs file access. As a text mode tool, however, it could stand to use some colorful character improvement.
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One of the first functions many C programmers code is max(). It returns the largest of two values. Though this operation can also take place by using a simple if-else comparison, it’s a great way to teach how functions work and test various comparison operators. But this task isn’t the challenge for this month’s exercise.
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