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 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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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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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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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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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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You may have seen this sequence on the Internet, in one of those “guess which number goes next?” type of posts:
1 11 21 1211 ...
So, which number comes next? I suppose it’s possible to divine a solution mathematically, but this sequence is known as a Look-and-Say sequence.
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I’ve seen functions (okay, methods) in other programming languages that let you digitally tussle with an array. You can split an array, trim it, expand it, insert elements, remove elements, and so on. Such things are possible in C, but you must code the function yourself.
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I’ve written before about array subscripts and how they’re secretly expressions. But another weird aspect of array subscripts also looms on the horizon: The format a[1] can be written as 1[a].
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Details about a pointer can easily be obtained and output: it’s name, address, and contents. Obtaining the size of the buffer it references, however, is a different animal.
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