For me, the scariest part of learning how to program a computer was file access. The problem was the horrid documentation. It introduced both sequential and random file access together without much explanation. So it was with much trepidation that I wrote my first file I/O program. That’s when I realized that the manual was stupid.
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One of the burdens of being a programmer is that few people are witness to your brilliance. You can write the keenest code since the Countess of Lovelace and it’s likely no one will ever appreciate your genius. But don’t let this limitation stop you!
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Nothing paralyzes a C programmer like double-asterisk notation. What does it mean? Can you use it? How is it passed to a function and then referenced? I, too, fall victim to this confusion. So a good explanation is in order.
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C is stream oriented, but in a terminal window you can use ANSI commands to provide more control. These commands can change text color as well as manipulate the cursor’s location, as covered in this month’s Exercise solution. The manipulation isn’t over yet!
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The task for this month’s Exercise is to clear the screen. I pray you didn’t arrive at a solution that outputs multiple blank lines. No, you must use the ANSI codes offered in the exercise post to manipulate the cursor and wipe clean the screen. Or you could cheat, which is what I did.
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One of my first programming obsessions was online communications. I wrote several modem programs for the TRS-80 (in Z80 Assembly) and then moved to the IBM PC/MS-DOS where I coded communications programs in both Assembly and C. I learned a few things.
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If you’ve studied the terminal window at any length, you probably know about the clear command, which clears the screen. Under MS-DOS, and on my old TRS-80, the command is cls. Same thing.
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The final (and merciful) update to my Grid of Random Stars program involves two major changes. First, because I call the update_grid() function only once, it can be incorporated into the main() function, no program. Second, I remove pointer notation.
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The program may output what I want, but the code isn’t done yet. Continuing from last week’s Lesson, I’d like the program to output a single grid showing a summary of all the rectangles found. This update requires more changes to the existing code.
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The two problems I recognized in the code from last week’s Lesson were that scan_column() and find_right() don’t need to be separate functions. Also, the code fails to find all the rectangles in the grid, which is bad. Time to fix the code!
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