Computers are good at performing repetitive tasks; doing the same boring nonsense over and over. Two great examples are searching and sorting.
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Sorting It All Out
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Author Archives: dgookin
Pattern Manipulation – Solution
This month’s Exercise was to create a cycle of numbers, values that repeat within a certain range. Of all the Exercises presented so far on this site, this one probably has the greatest number of solutions.
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Other Ways to Fetch the CWD
In last week’s Lesson I mentioned the constant, MAXPATHLEN. Like PATH_MAX, it returns the size of the maximum number of characters allowed in a pathname. Unlike PATH_MAX, however, MAXPATHLEN is defined in the sys/param.h header file, not limits.h.
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Pattern Manipulation
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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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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