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*
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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