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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You know you’re a nerd when you look at today’s date, November 1st, as 11-01 and then you think, “That’s a binary number!” Yeah, nerd.
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Among the C language’s slender assortment of keywords you find goto. It’s a branching statement, which can be used to loop or to escape from some ugly programming knot. Regardless, you’re told early on in your C language education that you must avoid this keyword at all costs! That is, unless you want to try this month’s exercise.
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The final step of the pointer storage program is to add data to the various buffers, or “sticks,” where ten integer values are stored. This step involves ugly double-pointer notation. If you can, please review last week’s Lesson to get up to speed on how storage is allocated and how these pointers are managed.
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Expanding an allocated buffer is something you can do with a pointer, but not with an array. This flexibility is why I encourage all C language students to understand and use pointers, though it doesn’t make the concept nay less onery.
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Perhaps the most difficult part of learning C is understanding and coding pointers. Even when you have a grip on things, it helps to keep fresh and practice new and utterly obnoxious ways to play with pointers.
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The challenge for this month’s Exercise is to code Heron’s Formula. This geometric magic calculates the area of a triangle given the length of each of its three sides.
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