The Linux dictionary stores its words sorted alphabetically. Therefore, the output from the program presented in last week’s Lesson shows valid hexwords (letters A through F, four letters or longer) in alphabetic order. But what if I want the words output in numerical order?
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Category Archives: Lesson
The HexWord Tally and Total
The dictionary is full of words composed of only the letters A through F, which are also hexadecimal digits. These English language hexwords can be pulled from the computer’s digital dictionary, which was demonstrated in last week’s Lesson. Time to update the code!
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HexWords
Hexadecimal, or counting base 16, uses letters A through F to represent values 11 through 15. This base — “hex” — is common in programming as it works as a shorthand for binary values. But the letters used are also letters, which means that they can spell words.
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Testing For the random() Function
Silly me. I once assumed that just because my compiler offered the random() function — a superior version of the C library standard rand() function — that every compiler fatured this function. Boy, was I wrong!
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Seeing What’s Left Over with Division
Learning division in school means long division. The process involves a quotient and a remainder. For example, 42÷8 works out to 5 (quotient) with 2 remainder. On a computer, however, division renders the result as 5.25. So how do you get the remainder separated?
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The Second K&R Program (That No One Talks About)
The original K&R, the first C programming book — and truly the programming book all others are based upon, is famous for its “Hello, world!” program. It’s the first program in the book. But what about the second program? Do you know what it is?
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More Terminal Screen Manipulation
Bouncing a cursor on the screen is a fun programming exercise, and you can use common C library techniques and ANSI escape sequences to make it happen in a terminal window, as covered in last week’s Lesson. At this point, most programmers would be content and leave well enough alone. Not me!
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Bouncing an Asterisk
For last week’s Lesson, I gathered various techniques to show how the terminal screen can be manipulated directly in C without using a library like Ncurses. I have a few more tricks to show.
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Playing with the Terminal
I miss the bad old days, back when I first learned to program. The microcomputers of the day were single user, single task. The hardware was directly accessible. You can truly do some messing around, which was quite entertaining for a budding programmer.
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The Look-and-Say Sequence
(As Much as the Computer Can)
Coding a Look-and-Say sequence should be fun, just like any C programming project where you’re not under pressure from a deadline. From last week’s Lesson, I was able to create a nested loop that takes a number and outputs its Look-and-Say values. It’s time to update this code to output a sequence.
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