You see them all the time, mostly as “busy” gizmos. They are animations that spin or dance to deceive you into believing that the software is really doing something. But they’re merely animations. In fact, they’re very simple animations that require practically effortless coding.
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Author Archives: dgookin
Fetching the Current Path
The C library hosts many file and directory management functions. They’re all pretty standard, no matter which operating system you use. What isn’t standard, however, is the size of a pathname. That value plays an important role if you’re to properly allocate memory to store directory information.
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Finding the PATH_MAX
Your code may be compiled on a PC, Mac, Linux system, or even some microcontroller. In each case, it helps to know the environment before you code. You can guess, but it’s better to use the defined constants — if they’re available to you.
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Know Your Limits
Back when I was a young, budding nerd, I popped off how there are always 8 bits in a byte. A much wiser programmer raised an eyebrow and quizzed me, “Always?”
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Round Numbers – Solution
This month’s Exercise required you to create three rounding functions: roundup(), rounddown(), and roundhalf(). Each one deals with a floating-point value in a specific way, but they all handle the basic rounding chore by typecasting a floating point variable to an integer.
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Official C Library Rounding Functions
Nestled within the C Library are various functions mathematical, a handful of which are used to round floating point values. The most common of them are ceil(), floor(), and rint().
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Round Numbers
The C library holds functions that help you round-off floating point values. I can name a few, but then it would make this month’s rounding exercise too easy. So I won’t!
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What is True?
It happens so often, I’m curious as to why the C language standard I/O header file doesn’t define TRUE and FALSE. Then again, what is TRUE and FALSE to a programming language — or to a computer? Why is this value true and that value false in the first place?
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Yet Another Way to Cap an Array
You don’t know how many items the array might store, so you guess. Then the program fetches only n values, all in the range of –X through 0 to +X. How do you know when the valid values stop?
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Averaging an Array of Unknown Size
Imagine you’re working with an array that has room to store thousands of integer values. You’ve been hired to craft a function that averages those values, but you don’t really know how many values are stored in the array. The guy who gave you the assignment (me), simply said that the array is capped with a zero value.
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