I’m a fan of the online game Spelling Bee. In this game, you use a combination of seven letters to spell various words. Each word is at least four-letters long and must contain a special letter, shown in the center of Figure 1. When you create a word that contains all seven letters, you’ve discovered a pangram.
Continue reading
Not all the nasty words are four letters long, but a good chunk of them are. If you ran the program from last week’s Lesson, you can quickly check the computer’s dictionary for the words you once couldn’t say on TV, gleefully typing them in and confirming that they exist in the dictionary. But how many four letter words are there?
Continue reading
At the basic level, a spell-checker works as a simple comparison program: The word in question is compared with each word in the dictionary. When the source word isn’t found, it’s assumed to be misspelled. With a dictionary file on your computer, it’s easy for a C programmer to code this type of program.
Continue reading
It’s time for your computer to babble nonsensically. No alcohol is necessary. All you must do is pluck out a random word from the dictionary. Run the program several times and you have babbly nonsense: subtotal spectacles lute's sushi's. Brilliant! *HIC*
Continue reading
Beyond knowing how many words are in the computer’s dictionary, another good measure to know is how many characters are in the longest word. Together, these two values give you a profile for the complete word matrix.
Continue reading
I admit it: I’m a nerd and I read the dictionary. I know it’s a reference, not a work of fiction. The plot is weak. But I found it enjoyable as a kid to discover new words and their meanings. Alas, the Unix dictionary file lists only words and not definitions. But how many words are in there?
Continue reading
My first Unix System Administrator job was pretty routine: I did backups. It was only later that I discovered some of the many nerdy treasures available in that operating system.
Continue reading
The make utility has been around since the early days of Unix. This tool is designed to create large projects by compiling and linking files based on dependencies. It takes care of a lot problems managing multi-module files to streamline the build process.
Continue reading
At 205 lines of code in last week’s Lesson, my memory-file project is getting larger by the day. At some point, the source code files must be broken out into separate modules, then compiled and linked separately. This is how I handle all large projects when it becomes too unwieldly to edit everything in a single file.
Continue reading
The two types of file access are sequential and random. Sequential access means the file’s data is read from beginning to end, one byte after the other. Random access isn’t random in the sense that it’s haphazard. No, random access means you can read data from any position in the file: beginning, middle, or end.
Continue reading