I’ve been working on a program that counts unique words in a text file. It’s an interesting exercise and explores the larger realm of pattern matching. You can try such scanning on a smaller scale by coding a program that counts the frequency of letters within a string. And that task is presented as this month’s Exercise.
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Have you ever heard a programmer mock the C language? Recently, a C# programmer informed me that C was okay, but “you can’t even split a string in C in less than 20 lines of code.”
Challenge accepted!
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The main() function is the first C language function you learn to write. It’s required. And you probably know that it has arguments, which are culled from the command prompt and made available to the program. So what stupid stuff can you do with main()?
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I find it fun to debug code. I add various printf() statements to a program to display values and quickly determine what’s going on. This process seems easier than toiling with a debugger.
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The puzzle for this month’s Exercise was to create and fill a 20-by-20 character grid with 20 asterisks placed at random positions, no two asterisks in the same spot. I hope you found this Exercise interesting, but not too easy.
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Many moons ago, I coded a file-renaming utility. It allows me to shuffle chapter names for documents used in my books, renaming a whole batch at once without overwriting existing filenames. It couldn’t happen if I didn’t know about the mktemp() function.
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I’m fascinated by grids. Consider the chessboard, which is a grid. Or think about the most basic game grid, a 3-by-3 array for a game of tic-tac-toe. Programming a grid is a common thing, so your best hope is that this month’s Exercise is yet another super cinchy silly grid program.
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Factor is a scary word, but not really a mathematical monstrosity. If you have an integer value, its factors are the other integers that can divide evenly into the original value. The computer can deftly discover these values, providing you give it the proper C code to munch upon.
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While browsing some sample code recently, I encountered the following C language expression:
x = &(*ptr);
Both variables x and ptr are pointers. So what the heck is going on?
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In C, the time_t variable type is associated with the Unix epoch, or the number of seconds ticked since midnight, January 1, 1970. It’s typically a long int value, though as a typedef declaration, its specific data type could change in the future. Still, as a long int, you can play with it like other integers in your code.
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