I miss the bad old days, back when I first learned to program. The microcomputers of the day were single user, single task. The hardware was directly accessible. You can truly do some messing around, which was quite entertaining for a budding programmer.
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Coding a Look-and-Say sequence should be fun, just like any C programming project where you’re not under pressure from a deadline. From last week’s Lesson, I was able to create a nested loop that takes a number and outputs its Look-and-Say values. It’s time to update this code to output a sequence.
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You may have seen this sequence on the Internet, in one of those “guess which number goes next?” type of posts:
1 11 21 1211 ...
So, which number comes next? I suppose it’s possible to divine a solution mathematically, but this sequence is known as a Look-and-Say sequence.
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In the C language, a structure is used to express complex data types. The structure contains members that describe different parts of this complex data, such as a matrix required in this month’s Exercise.
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I’ve seen functions (okay, methods) in other programming languages that let you digitally tussle with an array. You can split an array, trim it, expand it, insert elements, remove elements, and so on. Such things are possible in C, but you must code the function yourself.
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I’ve written many C programming Lessons and Exercises that deal with matrixes. For most of them, such as rotating a matrix, I rely on uniform matrix sizes, like 5×5 or 10×10. This approach makes coding easier, but it doesn’t properly describe every type of matrix.
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I’ve written before about array subscripts and how they’re secretly expressions. But another weird aspect of array subscripts also looms on the horizon: The format a[1] can be written as 1[a].
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Details about a pointer can easily be obtained and output: it’s name, address, and contents. Obtaining the size of the buffer it references, however, is a different animal.
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Clearing the pointer hurdle is a major leap to learning the C programming language. Using the malloc() function to allocate storage is central to grasping this concept. Then along comes the realloc() function, and minds are blown.
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The rules for naming variables, or identifiers, in C are simple: The names must start with a letter and contain letters and numbers. The _ (underscore) counts as a letter. Upper- and lowercase letters are considered differently. And only the first 31 characters are significant, though some platforms may extend this length.
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