If you’ve tried your computer’s patience, you may have encountered some valid yet odd results when doing math. For example, you may see NaN output, which is computer-speak for “Not a number.” Or perhaps you’ve encountered INF, infinity. The C library offers a way to test for these results before they’re output.
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Pointers can drive C programmers mad. In fact, I’d say that evidence of this notion is that the most experienced C programmers have an air of insanity about them. To join their club, try working this month’s Exercise.
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It’s easy to explain the bsearch() function when using integers. One step up is to search for strings, covered in last week’s Lesson. At the pinnacle of insanity, however, is searching through an array of structures.
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When learning the bsearch() function, it helps to start with integers, as demonstrated in last week’s Lesson. When the data is more complex, however, additional programming kung-fu is required to sort and search. The first hill to climb in this adventure is to hunt down a string.
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Computer scientists, as well as various professionals wearing white lab coats, have determined that searching for data top-to-bottom is slow and clunky. Therefore, they devised a better, more logical way to search: The binary search.
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Finding things is an unwanted pastime for humans. “Where are the good scissors?” “Who has seen the cat?” “What happened to all my money?” These issues don’t exist for a program that dutifully locates any data tidbit without complaint. Finding the smallest needle in the largest haystack isn’t an issue for a computer.
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In an alternative universe, the C programming language lacks a modulus operator and no companion function exists in the library. What to do! Why, you code your own modulus function, which is the challenge for this month’s Exercise.
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Programming language more modern than C sport great libraries of functions, or “methods.” Java has so many I doubt that a single programmer knows them all. In C, however, when a function is absent (and a lot of them are, comparably), you must code your own. Such is the case with building a string.
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I think any kid learning math in school knows what a remainder is, but few understand (or are taught) what a modulus is. It obtains the remainder of one value divided by another, specifically a larger value divided by a smaller value. In C programming, the % (modulo) operator performs this calculation. But what if the C language lacked a modulo operator?
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The final step in my Pig Latin journey is to process an entire English language sentence. The piglatin() function, finished in last week’s Lesson, requires no updates. But chopping a sentence into words and sending them off to be processed individually proved to be an interesting exercise.
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