To help improve the presentation of encoded data, consider sprucing up the output.
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Encoding and Decoding, Part II
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Author Archives: dgookin
Encoding and Decoding, Part I
A good way to exercise your C programming muscles is to work on a encoding/decoding project. This process makes you think about data and how it’s represented, and also how to work on both ends of an input/output puzzle.
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On-the-fly Variables
Traditionally, a C program announces its variables at the start of a function block. The variables are presented by type and name, and they can be initialized at that time as well. This tradition isn’t a rule, and many C programmers break it.
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Reading a File Randomly
Random file access isn’t about generating a random value and then reading at that position in the file. While you could do that, the term random access refers to file access that isn’t sequential. I suppose they could have called it dynamic file access, but I was only 8-years-old when computer scientists developed these concepts, so my input would not have been welcome.
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The Hailstone Sequence – Solution
My solution to this month’s Exercise is split into two main parts. The first part generates the random value in the range of 1 to 100. The second part performs the Hailstone sequence on that value.
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Abuse the File Position Indicator
Files can be read sequentially or you can hop around, reading this chunk or that chunk, which is how random file access works. Internally, however, it’s all just file access. The difference between sequential and random file access is how the file position indicator is abused.
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The Hailstone Sequence
The Hailstone sequence is based on the theory is that you can perform a specific calculation on any positive integer to create a series of numbers. No matter which positive integer you start with, eventually the sequence ends with the value 1.
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More File Access Messing
In last week’s Lesson, I covered the ftell() function, which returns the current file position indicator. That indicator can be manipulated, allowing you to control how a file is read in a non-sequential way.
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Messing with File Access
Like reading a book, sequential file access starts at the file’s beginning (or top) and reads bytes one after the other until the nefarious EOF is encountered. You probably don’t think about how that works, and you don’t need to. The operating system handles the job of reading a file; your C code is simply along for the ride.
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To Increment Before or After
Say you have a for loop that increments one notch each time it repeats. I code such a loop in this fashion:
for(x=0;x<10;x++)More common, however, programmers use this approach:
for(x=0;x<10;++x)The difference is in how the variable x is incremented. I put the ++ after the x, but most coders put it before. What the deal?
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