String storage is one of those frustrating things in the C language. Specifically, it’s that null character, \0, that appears at the end of every string. Is that character counted when you input a string? Copy a string? Create storage for a string? It’s a mystery that could drive you nuts.
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When I first learned the C language, I was surprised to find something missing from its assortment of operators. The +, -, *, and / operators are pretty common for nearly all programming languages. And you’ll find the % and ! operators used for modulus and logical NOT in a few programming languages. Yet what other languages have that C lacks is an exponent or power operator.
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The common way for humans to describe a file is to use its name. You refer to hello.txt as a file. The fopen() function C uses this nomenclature, which is handy and convenient. While a program runs, however, a file number is assigned to an open file.
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The C library contains various mathematical rounding functions, such as ceil(). That function, however, rounds up floating point values to the next integer. For this month’s Exercise, your job was to round up an integer to multiples of 16: 16, 32, 48, and 64.
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When I code a program, I start out by slapping together the various elements. I setup the variables, I write some quick routines, and I add comments to the tune of /* Do something here*/. With those bricks in place, I go back and fill in the mortar to make it all work. If the code runs, great! That rarely happens, so more work is involved.
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Not everything in the real world appreciates the holy computer numbers. These are binary values that parallel the powers of 2: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and so on.
A common computer puzzle is how to allocate storage specific to those holy numbers, especially when the sizes of items that you’re working with don’t exactly line up to a specific holy computer number.
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Plenty of interesting and fun programming puzzles are available to test your skills. Some of these puzzles come from the realm of mathematics or logic. What those propellerheads do with the solutions is up to them, but often you can code such problems to help you learn more about programming. One such logic problem is called 100 Doors.
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Some C coders really go nuts with macros. I’m not a big fan of those people.
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When you desire to do something specific in your program, or have a chunk of code that’s duplicated elsewhere, you craft a function. That’s the traditional, problem-solving approach, and the C language is full of functions. Yet sometimes, programmers build macros instead of functions.
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The purpose of the winner() function in the horse race game is to determine which value in an integer array is the largest. That would be an easy exercise to write, but it lacks the thrill and excitement of a horse race.
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