The C11 standard added the “underscore” bunch to the C language’s traditional keywords:
_Alignas
_Alingof
_Atomic
_Bool
_Complex
_Generic
_Imaginary
_Noreturn
_Static_assert
_Thread_local
I don’t routinely use any of these in my programs, beyond trying a few out to see how they work. The _Bool keyword comes in handy. The rest? Well, they’re worth exploring from a curiosity standpoint. For this week’s Lesson, I reveal the mysteries of the _Generic keyword.
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The C compiler preprocessor is a sneaky and powerful thing. I’m unsure of any other programming languages that have such a tool.
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My approach for initializing a buffer is to use a loop and assign each byte a value such as zero or the null character, '\0'. It’s tedious, but necessary. And for the impatient, some functions are available to perform this task for you.
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When my code requires a random odd buffer, I generally assign it a given size in some holy computer value: 16, 32, 64, and so on. But a defined constant exists, BUFSIZ, that can also be used to set a buffer size safely and consistently on all C compilers.
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The defined constant NULL represents a null or empty pointer. I’ve written before that the constant isn’t defined as zero, though such an assumption could lead you into trouble.
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Today marks 8 years that this blog has been online. The first post was made April 13, 2013. The blog was up for a few months before the book C Programming For Dummies was released. This way material would be available for the first readers.
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Mathematicians truly enjoy doing their math thing. As a mortal human, I don’t have a spot for math things on my “fun” spectrum. Yet, one of the more jolly things the math nerds do is discuss the value zero.
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I hope you had a wee bit of a struggle with your solution to this month’s Exercise. It involves a lot of decisions and proper steps in the right order to hold off on debits so that the bank account never dips below zero.
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I recall the math class where negative numbers were introduced. I was appalled. From Star Trek, I easily accepted the concept of antimatter, but the notion of negative values deeply offended me.
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Your bank receives two deposits or credits and three bills or debits. The credits cover the debits, meaning that your balance should never go below zero, but the bank has clever software: The bills are calculated first, which thrusts your account into negative territory complete with fees — even though the deposits cover the bills. Is this obnoxious behavior the result of greedy bankers or clever programming?
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