Math should be fun. My observation is that it’s not taught correctly in school, so generations of students get an education, but are weak in math. I’m one of them. As I’ve aged, I’ve grown fond of math, but still struggle with it. That’s disappointing because so much of math is actually kind of cool, just not explained well.
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C language pointers are smarter than the old BASIC peek and poke commands. A pointer knows the the type of value it’s referencing in memory, specifically how large the value is or how many bytes of storage it occupies. You can use the Code::Blocks debugger to witness such pointer intelligence.
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Your task for this month’s Exercise is to take a timestamp string and move values from inside a string (characters) into a structure. It’s not an easy exercise, and it doesn’t have a single, best solution.
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In last week’s Lesson, the Code::Blocks debugger helped examine the values of two variables, short int a and short int pointer p. Pointer p revealed a memory location inside the computer, which you can examine by using Code::Block’s Memory dump window.
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A timestamp is one of those tricky chunks of data that’s not really a single value. Often it’s a clutch of integers or — worse — it’s a string. To do time calculations on the timestamp, you must translate it into a more useful form.
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Back in the microcomputer days, hobbyists used the BASIC language to program their proto-PCs. BASIC is easy to learn, sloppy and forgiving. It also hints at some low-level language attributes, primarily with the PEEK and POKE commands.
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Five years (plus eight days) ago, this blog went public with its first post. It was several months before the companion book, Beginning Programming with C For Dummies appeared, but I wanted the blog to be well-stocked with posts for those first, eager readers.
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A function that reads a string of 1s and 0s to generate an integer value output just screams to be called binput(). Yet, because my new version of the binbin() function (to display a binary value as a string) is called binString(), I decided to call its companion function stringBin(). Sorry to disappoint you.
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Your task for this month’s Exercise is to code a text-processing routine that interprets the ^ character as a toggle for all-caps output. This challenge can be difficult, depending on how you interpret the toggle.
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In my books, I use the binbin() function to display binary values. It’s a good way to demonstrate some of the C language’s low-level bitwise functions: The binbin() function lets you see the effect of bitwise operations at a binary level, all those ones and zeros.
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