Opening and closing a memory-file is just academic. To make the whole shebang work, you must be able to read and write data.
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To treat a chunk of memory as a file, it must be “opened” and a handle returned for future file reference and interaction. Likewise, the memory-file must be “closed” when you no longer need it. To accomplish these tasks, I’ve crafted the mem_open() and mem_close() functions.
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In the Unix environment, everything is a file. For example, you can open the terminal as a file, which I covered in a previous Lesson. But what about memory? Can you open memory as a file? And why would you want to?
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With all the storage available in a modern computer, it’s easy — and often perfectly okay — to be overly generous when allocating memory. Still, the old coder in me has a lingering desire to save every byte possible. So when it comes to crafting a solution for this month’s Exercise, my desire is to be byte stingy.
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My solution for this month’s Exercise took some terrible assumptions. First, that the strings are merely output and not stored. Second, that the strings are perfectly formed camelCase and snake_case. In this Lesson, I address the first concern.
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In my code update for last week’s Lesson, I used return statements to send strings back to the main() function. This technique works — only once, even though the strings are declared static in the token() function.
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I refer to the process of converting special characters into strings as tokenizing. The token is a character or string — a code. This code is translated into something else, which allows the program to deal with complex items in a simple manner.
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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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