Unlike the iffy issue with assigning a pointer directly to a string, you cannot declare a pointer and assign it an immediate value. This puzzle was presented in last week’s Lesson. No, to do things properly requires not a single statement but three separate steps.
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I’m delighted to receive reader email regarding the various puzzles in the C programming language. Some of them involve creative thinking and approaches that seem like they work — but don’t. Pointers are one of the most common subjects.
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The C11 standard added the “underscore” bunch to the C language’s traditional keywords:
_Alignas
_Alingof
_Atomic
_Bool
_Complex
_Generic
_Imaginary
_Noreturn
_Static_assert
_Thread_local
I don’t routinely use any of these in my programs, beyond trying a few out to see how they work. The _Bool keyword comes in handy. The rest? Well, they’re worth exploring from a curiosity standpoint. For this week’s Lesson, I reveal the mysteries of the _Generic keyword.
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My approach for initializing a buffer is to use a loop and assign each byte a value such as zero or the null character, '\0'. It’s tedious, but necessary. And for the impatient, some functions are available to perform this task for you.
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When my code requires a random odd buffer, I generally assign it a given size in some holy computer value: 16, 32, 64, and so on. But a defined constant exists, BUFSIZ, that can also be used to set a buffer size safely and consistently on all C compilers.
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The defined constant NULL represents a null or empty pointer. I’ve written before that the constant isn’t defined as zero, though such an assumption could lead you into trouble.
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Mathematicians truly enjoy doing their math thing. As a mortal human, I don’t have a spot for math things on my “fun” spectrum. Yet, one of the more jolly things the math nerds do is discuss the value zero.
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I recall the math class where negative numbers were introduced. I was appalled. From Star Trek, I easily accepted the concept of antimatter, but the notion of negative values deeply offended me.
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The strfmon() function, introduced in last week’s Lesson properly formats a monetary value for specific regions. To unlock the function’s various features, you must understand and use formatting placeholders.
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The C programming language doesn’t sport the thousands of functions (or methods or what-have-you) available in Java. They say Java programmers may never use or even know the variety. With many fewer functions available in the standard C library, I would think to know them all. Then along comes another one I’ve neither used nor heard of. This week’s Lesson covers such as function, strfmon().
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