Updating the hexdump utility with color is good, but adding wide characters for output is even better. From last week’s Lesson, I’m adding wide character output to generate codes for non-printing ASCII values 0 through 31 and 127.
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The hexdump utility is a marvelous tool for grabbing a sneak peek at a file’s innards, especially when debugging code that performs file access. As a text mode tool, however, it could stand to use some colorful character improvement.
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A new keyword added with the C23 standard is constexpr. It’s a storage class specifier that sets a constant value. Unlike the original C language qualifier, const, storage declared with the constexpr is truly constant and cannot be altered, as was demonstrated in last week’s Lesson.
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The C language has an issue with constants. As far as I can tell, three different ways are at your disposal to express a constant: constant expressions, literal constants, and constant types. More variety may be available, which adds to the confusion.
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Only a handful of days of the year have a number format containing only ones and zeros. These “binary dates” are found by examining each day of the year to check for binary digit validity. In last week’s Lesson, I presented code to generate and save each of the year’s 365 dates as a 4-character string. It’s time to check each of them for binary date validity.
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Last week’s post was on 1101, which is a binary number! My inner nerd got so excited, I aimed to write code that locates and outputs all binary dates throughout the calendar year.
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You know you’re a nerd when you look at today’s date, November 1st, as 11-01 and then you think, “That’s a binary number!” Yeah, nerd.
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The final step of the pointer storage program is to add data to the various buffers, or “sticks,” where ten integer values are stored. This step involves ugly double-pointer notation. If you can, please review last week’s Lesson to get up to speed on how storage is allocated and how these pointers are managed.
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Expanding an allocated buffer is something you can do with a pointer, but not with an array. This flexibility is why I encourage all C language students to understand and use pointers, though it doesn’t make the concept nay less onery.
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Perhaps the most difficult part of learning C is understanding and coding pointers. Even when you have a grip on things, it helps to keep fresh and practice new and utterly obnoxious ways to play with pointers.
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