Computer scientists, as well as various professionals wearing white lab coats, have determined that searching for data top-to-bottom is slow and clunky. Therefore, they devised a better, more logical way to search: The binary search.
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Finding things is an unwanted pastime for humans. “Where are the good scissors?” “Who has seen the cat?” “What happened to all my money?” These issues don’t exist for a program that dutifully locates any data tidbit without complaint. Finding the smallest needle in the largest haystack isn’t an issue for a computer.
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In an alternative universe, the C programming language lacks a modulus operator and no companion function exists in the library. What to do! Why, you code your own modulus function, which is the challenge for this month’s Exercise.
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Programming language more modern than C sport great libraries of functions, or “methods.” Java has so many I doubt that a single programmer knows them all. In C, however, when a function is absent (and a lot of them are, comparably), you must code your own. Such is the case with building a string.
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I think any kid learning math in school knows what a remainder is, but few understand (or are taught) what a modulus is. It obtains the remainder of one value divided by another, specifically a larger value divided by a smaller value. In C programming, the % (modulo) operator performs this calculation. But what if the C language lacked a modulo operator?
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The final step in my Pig Latin journey is to process an entire English language sentence. The piglatin() function, finished in last week’s Lesson, requires no updates. But chopping a sentence into words and sending them off to be processed individually proved to be an interesting exercise.
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From last week’s Lesson, the piglatin() function swallows a word and returns its Pig Latin translation, but only for words starting with a vowel. The operation for words that begin with a consonant is more complex.
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One of my older C programming books featured a sample program that translated English words into their Pig Latin equivalent. It’s time to revisit this code.
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This month’s Exercise is to write code to calculate a double factorial, which uses the !! notation. A double factorial works like a factorial, but uses only odd or even values based on the parity of the starting value.
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The C language uses defined constants to represent consistent values across platforms. For example, the PATH_MAX value might be 260 on one system and 4096 on another. It’s not important to know the specific value, just use the defined constant and your code builds and runs on various systems (hopefully).
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