When displaying a long string of text, it’s polite — and expected — for the programmer to wrap the text. Not wrapping the text would split words at the right margin, which irritates human readers to no end.
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Way back in the day, word wrap was fascinating. It was so unique that word processors boasted about it as a feature. I’m serious! That’s because a lot of the primitive (late 1970s and early 1980s) word processing programs did not wrap text at the end of a line. Strange, but true.
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Nothing can be more disconcerting than text lopped off before the end of the li
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A basic C language process is passing a value to a function. If you’re an old hand, you might say, “Yeah, well, so?” For a beginning programmer, however, functions and their arguments can be a confusing and intimidating ordeal.
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When you first learn the C language, and you’re practicing basic input/output, you become familiar with the two I/O workhorses of the C library: printf() and scanf(). Of the two, printf() is my favorite. The scanf() function is highly useful, and it’s a great learning tool, but it’s not the best function for reading in a string of text.
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This post marks one year of the Unofficial C For Dummies website blog. Yeah!
I started this blog before the book was published. I wanted to ensure that anyone who bought the book would actually have some content up and available should they click the link. And I wrote a few posts before hot-linking the blog, just to make it more lively.
It’s been fun working this blog for the past year. I look forward to many more posts in the future. If you have any questions on my programming books, please email me; my address is shown below.
And remember: You don’t need an account here to enjoy the posts. If you’d like an account, send email to dan@c-for-dummies.com and I’ll set you up. No problem!
You might think that the command line is a relic of the past. For a mortal user, that’s correct: The only people I know who still dwell at the command prompt are power users. I keep a command prompt (terminal) window open on my computers, just because using the terminal is fast and I happen to know the commands. Yet, internally, all graphical operating systems still reference the command line.
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A few Lessons ago, I mentioned that a variable such as **months couldn’t be used to declare an array. That’s true because the **months construction doesn’t use array notation. Duh. That doesn’t mean that **months is totally out of luck.
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Of course computers can do math! Of course, programming has some math in it! Yet one reason that programmers are not necessarily geniuses at math is that it’s the computer that does the math, not the programmer. To prove that truth, why not code your very own calculator program?
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As programmer, you have a choice: You can manipulate information as it’s sent to output or you can manipulate it in memory and then send the result to output. Depending on what the program does, however, you may not have that luxury. Sometimes you must make modifications in memory, saving them for later.
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