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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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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