The first post on this blog was made on April 13, 2013.
C Blog 9th Anniversary
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Author Archives: dgookin
Color Text, Part II
From last week’s Lesson, I showed how ANSI codes are used to set color text in terminal output. It’s time to go nuts showing the possibilities.
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The Babylonian Square Root – Solution
I was blown away by the elegance and simplicity of the Babylonian Method to calculate a square root, which is the topic of this month’s Exercise. I only hope that my solution lives up the challenge, lest I suffer the fate of the Assyrians.
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Color Text, Part I
Your C programs’ text output need not be so dull. Aside from adding wide characters, you can spice things up with color text. The terminal flavor is what determines the color palette. All you need to know are the secret codes that activate and deactivate the attributes.
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The Babylonian Square Root
Difficulty: ★ ★ ★ ☆
When I sought to write my own square root function back in 2020, I based it on a series of steps from the math.com website. I figured, “Hey! These guys are math nerds. They know their stuff.” Turns out, the ancient Babylonians beat them to the punch — and have a better method for calculating a square root.
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Accessing the Printer in C
Back in the old days, the printer was a device wired to the computer and handled directly by whatever program wanted to use it. Printing in C involved opening the printer device and sending the data. Today, things work differently.
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Initializing a Buffer – Your Own memset() Function
As I wrote in last week’s Lesson, the C23 standard renders the memset() function — a standard C library function for over 30 years — obsolete. If you want to initialize a buffer, you can use the secure memset_s() or just initialize the buffer manually or with your own memset()-like function.
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The Perils of the memset() Function
While researching the upcoming — and significant — C23 version of the C programming language, I learned something surprising: The memset() function will be deprecated. It effectively does nothing when used in the C23 standard. The reason makes a lot of sense.
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Simplifying Fractions – Solution
This month’s Exercise both terrified and enticed me. Yes, I code these solutions myself after I think up the challenges. No cheating here! This particular puzzle was more fun than I imagined, but also required a lot of mental work.
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How Many Characters Output – So Far?
I doubt any C programmer has memorized all of the printf() function’s placeholders, options, and settings. It’s a character salad of interesting and weird things. One of the strangest has to be the %n placeholder.
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