Beyond knowing how many words are in the computer’s dictionary, another good measure to know is how many characters are in the longest word. Together, these two values give you a profile for the complete word matrix.
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I admit it: I’m a nerd and I read the dictionary. I know it’s a reference, not a work of fiction. The plot is weak. But I found it enjoyable as a kid to discover new words and their meanings. Alas, the Unix dictionary file lists only words and not definitions. But how many words are in there?
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I hope you didn’t “flip out” over this month’s Exercise. Flipping a coin can be done by hand or by using a computer. Using a computer is easier because it can be programmed to record each flip and it saves you hand muscle molecules for flipping and the chore of writing down the results.
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My first Unix System Administrator job was pretty routine: I did backups. It was only later that I discovered some of the many nerdy treasures available in that operating system.
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Probability. Odds. These are words I often confuse, but the similarity relates to how often things happen. The gold standard is the flip of a coin: two possibilities, heads or tails. If you don’t understand how it works, you can write code to drive home the point.
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The make utility has been around since the early days of Unix. This tool is designed to create large projects by compiling and linking files based on dependencies. It takes care of a lot problems managing multi-module files to streamline the build process.
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At 205 lines of code in last week’s Lesson, my memory-file project is getting larger by the day. At some point, the source code files must be broken out into separate modules, then compiled and linked separately. This is how I handle all large projects when it becomes too unwieldly to edit everything in a single file.
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The two types of file access are sequential and random. Sequential access means the file’s data is read from beginning to end, one byte after the other. Random access isn’t random in the sense that it’s haphazard. No, random access means you can read data from any position in the file: beginning, middle, or end.
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Opening and closing a memory-file is just academic. To make the whole shebang work, you must be able to read and write data.
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The challenge for this month’s Exercise is to write the charcount() function, which returns the number of characters in a string. The character matches exactly, so don’t worry about checking uppercase and lowercase differences.
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