I devised two solutions for this month’s Exercise. The basic solution can be solved in two steps, with a more involved solution using three.
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Find the Duplicates – Solution
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Author Archives: dgookin
A Curious Thing About Array Notation
It’s nuts. All through your C training when you learned about arrays, you were taught the format: array[x] where array is the name of the array and x is the element number. But this expression can also be written as x[array].
Mind. Blown.
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Find the Duplicates
You’ll find multiple reasons to remove duplicates from a series of random numbers. The main reason is that the process or generating random numbers is capable of yielding duplicate values. But more importantly, if your list represents discrete items in the real world, such as playing cards, you can’t really have a duplicate value pop up.
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Exit Status Defined Constants
The tradition for successfully exiting a command line program is to use return 0; or, as I write it, return(0);. Zero is the OK value, meaning a program exited cleanly. Other values returned represent specific conditions, not necessarily errors, but information that can be communicated to the operating system or some other program.
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The Element Doesn’t Exist
As a mid-level language, C has just as many positives as negatives with regards to accessing memory. One of the biggest negatives is C’s unflinching capability to access data that doesn’t exist.
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Variable Length Arrays
The C99 standard added a feature to dimension an array on-the-fly. The official term is variable length array or VLA. And while you might think everyone would love it, they don’t.
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The Wandering King – Solution
This month’s Exercise was inspired by a program I recall from years ago called The Drunk and the Lamppost. It’s not the classic joke, but an examination of random movements and probability.
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Declaring a String Literal as a Pointer
The best way to declare a string literal in your code is to use array notation, like this:
char string[] = "I am some sort of interesting string.\n";
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The Wandering King
The chessboard is empty. In the center is the king. He can move only one square at a time, but in any direction — or he can choose not to move at all. How many turns would it take him, moving randomly, to exit the chessboard?
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Does the File Exist?
Many programs rely upon external files to store data. When the file is missing, or not where it should be, the fopen() function returns a NULL pointer, which your code can act upon. Or, you can pre-check for the file’s existence by using the access() function.
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