In the C language, it’s called typecasting: A variable of one type — for an instant — masquerades as another variable type. In Hollywood, however, it’s a curse: The typecast actor can play roles other than the one he’s famous for creating. That sucks.
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Even when you add fudge to a matching system, occasionally that odd bit of data — the outlier — can wreck an otherwise close match. The question is, how many of those mismatches does your code allow?
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A fuzzy match that uses discrete amount of fudge might not yield a match, especially when the values cover a wide range. To better make the match work, set a percentage variation instead.
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Comparing values is a discrete process; an if comparison is absolute. The result is either true or false. Never is the result perhaps or somewhat — unless you add some fudge to the comparison.
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This month’s Exercise is to simulate turns in a game of tic-tac-toe (naughts and crosses). So the solution requires that you randomly work through available squares in the game matrix, alternating placement of an 'x' or 'o' token.
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Computer’s are notoriously obedient and serious. They’re exact. If you give them inaccurate instructions or bad data, the computer does its job without question. But the real world isn’t binary and often times it’s necessary to add some forgiveness into your code.
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The game of Tic-Tac-Toe, also called Noughts and Crosses, provides a fertile field to plow for any budding programmer. It involves a matrix (array), logic, decisions, and all sorts of fun. If you haven’t yet coded your own Tic-Tac-Toe game, I urge you to do so, but that’s not the topic for this month’s Exercise.
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I recently had a reader submit a question regarding input. He wanted to write code that would read a character and display that character’s ASCII code value. It sounds like a simple program, but you must understand variable types and the scanf() function’s peculiarities to properly code it.
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The typical first program taught to anyone learning C (or any other programming language) is Hello, world! It’s fun, which sets up false expectations, but it’s also genius.
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When I recently researched byte-flipping on the Internet, I was surprised that the solution I used back in the 1980s wasn’t listed among the top solutions available today. That’s probably because my brain thinks like an Assembly Language programmer, so I crafted a low-level solution.
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