I hope you didn’t find this month’s Exercise too difficult. I do occasionally like to toss in an easy one. But for me, the big task was getting the output just right.
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The Power Grid – Solution
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Author Archives: dgookin
Declaring Structures, Trick #2
In last week’s Lesson, I covered a trick you can use to assign values to structure members non-sequentially. It’s something you may rarely use, but a valid tool in your C programming tool chest. It’s also not the weirdest thing that can happen in a structure.
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The Power Grid
Difficulty: Easy
I enjoy programming tables, rows and columns. The standard technique is to use a nested loop. In fact, when teaching nested loops, outputting a table is par for the course.
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Declaring Structures, Trick #1
I refer to structures as “multi-variables” in my books and courses. Like a mini-database, they hold different data types and values, all bundled into a single unity. Structures form the basis of important programming concepts such as a linked list. Further, you can use structures to cheat and return multiple values from a function. As much as I dislike admitting it, structures are fun.
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More Than One String in a String
I’ve seen some oddball constructions in C. You may have as well, especially if you enjoy reading obfuscated C. Yet, the weirdness I just witnessed came from an online C course I was browsing. I’d never seen it before.
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Trigraph Sequences
I doubt you’ve ever used a trigraph. If you saw a trigraph in some C code, you might assume it was a typo or, from the early days of telecommunications, a modem burp. But trigraphs present a legitimate if not arcane way to represent certain characters, a holdover from the days of teletype input and primitive, barely-ASCII keyboards.
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Misused Placeholders
I received a question from a reader about improperly specifying a printf() placeholder. Specifically, he used %d (decimal integer) to output a string. Most compilers flag this condition as a warning, mismatched types or something similar. Still, the program is created and it runs. What does the output mean?
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Alphabedecimal Revisited – Solution
The challenge for this month’s Exercise is to count in “alphabedecimal,” generating output from AAAA through ZZZZ, without using nested loops or a complex if structure. Your solution must use a recursive function that handles flipping the digits, er, characters.
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Frying a String
The challenge for September’s Exercise is to scramble a string, jumbling its characters in a random pattern. I figured it’s a fun exercise, not anything useless beyond curiosity. Yet such a function exists for the GNU C library, strfry().
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Alphabedecimal Revisited
Difficulty: Medium
The goal of the November 2018 Exercise on this blog was to count in “alphabedecimal,” or base 26 using the uppercase letters of the alphabet. The solution cycles from AAAA to ZZZZ flipping each character (or digit) one at a time, just as numbers are counted. The challenge is to do so without employing a nested loop.
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