In the climatic scene of the movie Wargames, the WOPR computer plays Tic-Tac-Toe. A question is asked, “Can the computer play itself?” This postulation forms the basis of all computer learning, but that wasn’t the puzzle for this month’s Exercise.
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In last week’s Lesson, I described the history and gameplay for the classic text mode game, Hunt the Wumpus. The task of coding the game took considerably longer than writing the blog post.
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Last month, I published a post of the classic programming chestnut, a number-guessing game. In the post, I wrote: “Variable tries is set equal to 6 because I read somewhere that it’s possible to guess a value between 1 and 100 in six or fewer tries (though I’m probably incorrect).” And, yes, I was wrong.
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The game Hunt the Wumpus isn’t difficult to code in C. In fact, all you need do is start with the basic number-guessing game presented in last week’s Lesson and you can build just about any text-mode game. That’s what I did when I started my own C language version of Hunt the Wumpus.
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I was perusing Rosetta Code the other day, looking for more programming ideas to explore. One of the tasks provided, with examples in a variety of programming languages, was to code the old computer game Hunt the Wumpus.
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If you desire to store formatted output in a buffer, the snprintf() function, covered in last week’s Lesson, is a safe alternative to the standard Library sprintf() function. An even better choice is the asprintf() function.
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The problem with snipping blank lines from the end of a file is storing the file as it’s processed. At least that’s the issue I faced as I worked through my solution to this month’s Exercise.
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Another non-standard library function is snprintf(). Like the strlcpy() and strlcat() functions shown in previous Lessons, snprintf() is safer than its standard Library counterpart, sprintf().
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Recently, I wrote a utility that required the final line of text in a file to terminate with a special code. The code had to sit at the end of a line of text, not on a blank line. What I discovered is that many text files end with one or more blank lines.
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Coding my own version of the non-standard strlcat() function proved to be a bit more work than I anticipated. That’s because I also had to code my own versions of the strcpy() and strlen() functions to make the thing work.
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