Though I’m admittedly not good at math (at least according to my grades in school), I enjoy playing with math stuff on the computer. Programming allows me to mess with numbers and values without the risk of that ugly red mark and the need to wonder how a D or an F on my transcript affects my overall GPA.
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I had a reader offer me a puzzle the other day. His code ran well without the #include directive and he wondered why. I did, too.
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Your C programs aren’t meant to suffer with an inability to handle values such as the square root of -1, the imaginary number i. No, you can easily manage such mathematical mysteries, making rare the possibility of a -nan result, as shown in last week’s Lesson.
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The four-letter word that made me avoid computers and programming for far too long is math.
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My attempt to de-obfuscate the easter egg from the HBO series Silicon Valley didn’t help in my efforts to reverse engineer the code. I got close, but I just can’t obtain that first (or final) value.
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When Alexander faced the challenge of untangling the Gordian Knot, he just sliced it with his sword. Brilliant. Alas, untangling obfuscated C code takes more than a swift swipe of a blade.
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I’m a fan of the HBO Series, Silicon Valley. From creator Mike Judge, it excellently showcases the antics of the nerds who populate California’s Silicon Valley and the companies they work for. It’s a brilliant series that I highly recommend to my techy friends. Plus, it’s chock full of digitally delightful easter eggs.
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The insane challenge for this month’s Exercise is to generate a countdown loop without using any looping functions. And, no, you can’t just use a buncha printf() statements to output the values.
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As a string, a phone number is easy to parse, left-to-right, as shown in last week’s Lesson. As a value, however, the processing requires mathematical manipulation to work it from left-to-right.
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This Lesson’s topic is more about database programming than C programming, but the philosophy still applies. When do you store a number as a value as opposed to storing it as a string? Two famous examples are zip codes and phone numbers.
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