If given a pad, pencil, and a factor problem years ago, I would have found doing anything else in the world more exciting. Math is not my forte, yet it remains a curiosity. Especially with The Power Of The Computer, performing math exercises is more of an interesting challenge than a mental ordeal.
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C has three looping keywords: do, for, and while. These keywords construct a block of statements that repeat, hopefully but not necessarily with a terminating condition. Other programming languages offer additional looping keywords, including the popular and useful foreach.
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A harmonic series is a mathematical contraption that deals with cascading fractions. Like the Fibonacci series, I thought I could easily code a harmonic series in C — which I did, but not before reading up on the topic of divergence.
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My maths grades were horrible. I understand the concepts, but failed at solutions in class because I’d make silly mistakes. Computers make mistakes only when they’re programmed to do so, which means maths are far more enjoyable for me as a coder. For example, take the Fibonacci sequence.
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This month’s Exercise is to create a program that converts weight measurements by using this format:
nnnFT
Where nnn is a value, F is the unit to convert from, and T is the unit to convert to. This problem is more of an input-parsing exercise than a straight conversion.
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The Chicken McNuggets problem, presented in last week’s Lesson, shows code that outputs the highest McNuggets number from 1 to 100. This value isn’t a combination of 6, 9, or 20, the number of the pieces offered in the McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets packages.
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The three units of weight I’m familiar with are pounds, kilograms, and stone. For me, stone is the odd one. I’ve heard it used in Britain and it’s completely baffling to me, often requiring that I whip out a calculator to see what “14 stone” really means. Better, I could write code that converts between pounds, kilograms, and stone, which is the goal of this month’s Exercise.
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Chicken McNuggets come several to a box, depending on what you order: six pieces for a kid, nine pieces for an adult, or twenty pieces for an honest adult. These numbers in various combinations form what the math nerds call McNugget Numbers.
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Oh, how I distrusted recursion when I was a budding programmer. It’s just a tough concept to wrap your head around, especially if you’re an old warhorse Assembly programmer like me who lives in fear of blowing up the stack. Trivial asides aside, recursion often presents an elegant and efficient way to solve a programming puzzle.
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Like many other mathematical delights, the golden ratio pops up all over. It has a rich history, and a special Greek letter to represent it: φ phi. The value is irrational, meaning it cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers: 1.6180339…
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