A few months back, this blog’s monthly Exercise was to write a filter to reverse all text input. No matter how much text floated in, the filter gobbled it all up and spewed it back in reverse order. This month’s challenge is similar, but on a smaller scale.
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Let me be blunt: If you haven’t yet seen an undefined reference error, you truly aren’t a C programmer. In fact, the more of these messages you see, the longer you’ve been coding in C. Undefined reference errors are a badge of honor.
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It’s time to free yourself from the math-nerd aspect of the exp() function and put it to legitimate use by animating an asterisk bouncing across the screen. Such a feat may be considered unusual for a stream-oriented programming language like C, but I find animation more interesting than math.
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Text mode graphics were a Big Deal with computers for the longest time. C’s stream I/O didn’t stop various computer games from being developed throughout the 1970s and 1980s. And this limitation isn’t going to stop me from animating a falling ball, er, asterisk.
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Deep in the crevasse of oddball math functions is one that raises Euler’s number (e) to a given power. This calculation is vital enough in programming that it sports its own function, exp(). And I would ignore this function with exuberant glee were it not for a trick someone showed me a long time ago.
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My solution for this month’s Exercise didn’t require much work. What I did was to “stack overflow” the problem by pulling in functions from earlier Lessons. The only new portion of code deals with processing the input before sending the string off to the b36_decimal() function I’ve already written.
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Rolling seven dice over and over is how I passed time “playing” D&D. But I also played a game with the dice, one that I introduced in last week’s Lesson. That lesson’s code got things started. This Lesson finishes the project.
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Last month, I completed my series on Base 36, which uses digits 0 through 9 and A through Z to represent values. The use of these digits means that common words can represent values in base 36. In fact, your name is a base 36 value. But what is it?
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You would think that I’d be deeply into Dungeons and Dragons, but no. I can’t stand the game. I find it tedious and predictable, boring. But I did enjoy rolling all those dice. Who knew that a 20-side die is a thing — and that rolling a “nat 20” is a big deal?
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Continuing my Base 36 series, from last week’s Lesson, the base35_string() function successfully converts a decimal value into its base 36 representation. To verify that the conversion works, another function is necessary to convert base 36 strings into their decimal equivalents.
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