True is a logical condition. It’s often written TRUE just to confuse it with “true” which is a word that has other implications. But for programming, TRUE generally means success. It’s the opposite of FALSE, which generally means failure.
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Author Archives: dgookin
For Ever
The most basic and perhaps ancient of programming techniques is the loop. And the most basic loop is the for loop. It’s also pretty flexible.
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Multiplying Without Multiplication
Long, long ago, I was an ardent assembly language programmer. I admired coding in assembly because the programs were small and fast. On the early microcomputers, that was a plus.
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We Have a Winnah!
The game of Tic-Tac-Toe is played on a simple 3-by-3 grid, what C programmers would call a matrix. It’s not The Matrix, of course, but it’s a simple array in which players can battle.
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Text to Value Conversion
Sure, your programs can accept values from the input stream, but most of the time numeric input comes in the form of text. The issue then becomes how to transform the string “1234” into the value 1234.
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Hi-Low
Here’s a brain puzzle for you: Write a function that accepts a numeric array and returns the high and low values from that array. Can it be done?
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Say It in Binary
01010011011000010111100100100000010010010111010000100000
01101001011011100010000001000010011010010110111001100001
011100100111100100001010
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Round Me Up, Round Me Down
The C language library features a few rounding functions, but most of them deal with trimming floating point values down (or up) to integers. The other day I encountered an interesting problem: How to round a value up or down to the nearest value of 5.
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1st, 2nd, and 3th
For your June exercise, you need to concoct code that properly generates an ordinal number. Write a function that returns a string “st” “nd” “rd” or “th” that’s tacked on to any integer value from 1 through what-have-you.
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Fixing fgets() for Input
The fgets() function is a marvelous tool for reading chunks of text from the keyboard or standard input. One problem I have with it is that it also reads the Enter key press, sticking a \n into the string. That’s not a big issue, however, because you can easily pull out that character.
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