The challenge for this month’s Exercise is to write a microwave oven input routine: The user types in a given number of seconds and your program translates the value into the proper number of hours, minutes, and seconds. This type of problem may sound familiar.
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At the end of the main() function, a return statement must surrender an integer value to the operating system. Does a higher value please the OS? Is it offended by zero? What exactly happens with the value returned when your program is done?
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I have a smart microwave oven. Say I need to heat my tea for a minute and a half. I type in 90. When I press the Start button, the 90 transforms into 1:30, a minute thirty. It’s the same quantity of time, but expressed differently. Such magic is merely clever programming.
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I screwed up some code in a most delightful manner, all without knowing what I did. In fact, it was a student who ran my less-than-brilliant code and discovered the obvious flaw. But I was clueless.
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The strcasecmp() function isn’t part of the standard C library, though many compilers feature it. As having the function is handy, I wrote about crafting your own version back in 2019. Alas, that implementation is flawed.
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Any mortal programmer would have stopped with last week’s Lesson, where a tally of unique and duplicate words is output. This is the desired result, right? Yes, but it’s an un-orderly list.
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Encoding means nothing if you can’t decode, which is the task for this month’s Exercise: Transform the encoded hex bytes back into characters, unwinding the formula used to create them. The challenge isn’t really as much with coding the math as it is with translating hex bytes back into integer values — characters.
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The next step in the unique words program is to tally the count of each word. From last week’s Lesson, the word list is sorted, which makes the task of counting duplicates easy.
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The task for last month’s Exercise was to encode a string. As you may have feared, the task for this month’s Exercise is to decode that string. Let me review:
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In our last episode, the unique words code is able to parse and list individual words in the buffer. To find unique and duplicate words, the next step is to sort the list.
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