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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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Have you ever had your C code run amok and had to press Ctrl+C to cancel?
Yeah, I’ve never had that happen to me either.
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A specific command to terminate a program was popular with programming languages long ago. For example, in BASIC you had the END command, which exited a program. For unusual circumstances, you could use the STOP command. It was the abnormal termination command, which stopped the program and also generated a “Break in line” message (in GW Basic). I’m sure other early languages also had commands to bail out of a program, and modern languages are the same.
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