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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A new keyword added with the C23 standard is constexpr. It’s a storage class specifier that sets a constant value. Unlike the original C language qualifier, const, storage declared with the constexpr is truly constant and cannot be altered, as was demonstrated in last week’s Lesson.
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The C language has an issue with constants. As far as I can tell, three different ways are at your disposal to express a constant: constant expressions, literal constants, and constant types. More variety may be available, which adds to the confusion.
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Only a handful of days of the year have a number format containing only ones and zeros. These “binary dates” are found by examining each day of the year to check for binary digit validity. In last week’s Lesson, I presented code to generate and save each of the year’s 365 dates as a 4-character string. It’s time to check each of them for binary date validity.
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Last week’s post was on 1101, which is a binary number! My inner nerd got so excited, I aimed to write code that locates and outputs all binary dates throughout the calendar year.
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This month’s C programming Exercise is probably the most bizarre one I’ve ever offered! Using the goto keyword is frowned upon, which means that your C programmer brain is unaccustomed to thinking about using goto to construct, well, anything!
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