The first part of my writing career began by updating a computer book bestseller, The BASIC Handbook. This tome served as a lexicon for the various BASIC programming language dialects, allowing users from one version of BASIC to translate and use code from another version.
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Every so often I scour C library references, looking for fun or unusual functions. When I find one I’m unfamiliar with or something I’ve seldom used, I write about. After all, the functions do practical things that might be worthy of exploration. A recent example is gettimeofday().
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This month’s Exercise wasn’t astronomically difficult, but I did spend some time devising a solution. My goal was to try to avoid writing a nested loop. This goal proved unattainable.
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Things were stable back in the old days. When I first coded C, a char was 8-bits (a byte), and an int was 16-bits. The short was also 16-bits and the long, it was truly long at 32-bits. Today, things aren’t as consistent.
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After a few intermediate to advanced Exercises, I decided to try something that’s a little easier this month. Still, even if you’re a pro, it helps to pull back and try something basic just to see what you can do with it.
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After climbing the ternary I/O mountain, and crafting functions that both input and output base 3 values, the next step is obvious: Combine both functions into a single program. The step after that is less obvious: Change the code so that any base can be used to process input or generate output.
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I’m happy I chose to write the function that consumes a ternary value last, shown in last week’s Lesson. The process turns out to be not that big of a deal, though trepidations scurried around me as I wrote the code.
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I believe my approach was okay for generating ternary (base 3) numbers, but for some reason I couldn’t get my algorithm to work. From last week’s Lesson, here’s what I tried:
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The challenge for this month’s Exercise is not only to calculate Euler’s number, e, but to count how many loops a program must endure before your e value calculation matches the defined constant M_E. I hope you didn’t find this challenge too difficult.
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To generate a string of digits representing a value in a specific power base, such as base 3 (ternary), you need a power table. Using this power table, you can translate any positive integer into a string representation of the number in the given base. Sounds complex. Is complex.
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