A floating point, or real number, has two parts: Before the decimal comes the integer part. After the decimal is the fractional part. Sometimes it’s necessary to split such a value, so that your code can deal separately with the integer and fractional parts.
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Properly formed strings in C are terminated with the null character, \0. Accept it or die!
However . . .
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The critical issue about allocating and then freeing memory is to avoid a memory leak. This condition happens when a memory chunk gets lost, leaving the it lingering in RAM not doing anyone any good. Most often a memory leak occurs in a function.
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One criticism I receive is that my code examples, from both my online training material as well as in my C programming books, fail to free any allocated memory before the program quits. This assertion is correct, and I have a darn good reason why!
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The first post on this blog was made on April 13, 2013.
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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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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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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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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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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