I watched the film Contact a few weeks ago. The movie is about first contact with an alien civilization. It’s smart cinema, which offers that communications between species would be mathematical in nature, as math is the universal language.
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Tree structures are yet another way to organize data. They’re similar to a linked list, but with the data organized by value into a series of branches and leaves. OMG! It’s like a tree!
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Though I’m admittedly not good at math (at least according to my grades in school), I enjoy playing with math stuff on the computer. Programming allows me to mess with numbers and values without the risk of that ugly red mark and the need to wonder how a D or an F on my transcript affects my overall GPA.
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I had a reader offer me a puzzle the other day. His code ran well without the #include directive and he wondered why. I did, too.
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Your C programs aren’t meant to suffer with an inability to handle values such as the square root of -1, the imaginary number i. No, you can easily manage such mathematical mysteries, making rare the possibility of a -nan result, as shown in last week’s Lesson.
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The challenge for this month’s Exercise is to output a series of numbers, 1 through 10, and to ensure that the final number doesn’t look dorky. I’m certain that’s what I asked for.
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The four-letter word that made me avoid computers and programming for far too long is math.
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Here is an issue that crops up often in programming, specifically when outputting data in a series: How do you separate items in the series and not make the last item look dorky? It’s tricky.
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My attempt to de-obfuscate the easter egg from the HBO series Silicon Valley didn’t help in my efforts to reverse engineer the code. I got close, but I just can’t obtain that first (or final) value.
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When Alexander faced the challenge of untangling the Gordian Knot, he just sliced it with his sword. Brilliant. Alas, untangling obfuscated C code takes more than a swift swipe of a blade.
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