Unless the code must run endlessly, such as a program that operates a gas pump, an endless loop isn’t something you want. From last week’s Lesson, I crafted an endless loop to accept single-word input from the scanf() function to build a string. But no string is output because the loop never ends! It’s time to address this situation.
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Trying to salve my frustration with the scanf() function, I decided in last week’s Lesson to try to use scanf() to build a string. Because the function terminates standard input at the first whitespace character (space, tab, newline), the strings input must be stored and the string built in memory.
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The scanf() function is useful for teaching, but it’s a booger. I avoid it outside of demonstration purposes. But it does provide good fodder for training beginning programmers to think about stream I/O.
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Seven years ago (to this same date!) I wrote an Exercise to tally the digits in a number. The solution required that the sum be reduced to a single digit. For example, the sum of digits in 12345 is 15, which is then reduced to six.
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The power of an associative array is that it uses keys, text or numbers, to reference values. Know the key and you can fetch the value . This “association” works like an array in C, where you know the index or offset for an element. Though with an associative array, the index is a value or string — the key.
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The first phony associative array function I need to write is a simple dump: Output the array’s contents in the form of pairs. Performing this operation requires a bit of manipulation to the way the array is presented in the code.
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Being the ancient and venerable programming language it is, C lacks the associative array data type. This type of array is found in other languages, and it can be awkwardly simulated in C.
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I enjoy studying foreign languages. A tool like Google Translate comes in handy, but it’s not perfect. That’s because computers translate words and phrases, but not the living, spoken language. Regardless, I thought I’d give language translation a stab, which got me into the topic of exploring arrays.
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Last week’s Lesson explored using the clock_gettime() function to pause program execution for a given number of nanoseconds. The code, however, contains a flaw that may render an inaccurate result.
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I’ve written about my own delay() function, which uses processor clock ticks to calculate a time delay in milliseconds. Thanks to the clock_gettime() function, I can write a new time-delay function that operates from nanoseconds — or close to it. I hope.
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