I occasionally visit Rosetta Code to look for C language inspiration. The site offers a programming puzzle, then presents solutions in various languages. A recent challenge involved the 21 number game — but the C language had no solution!
Continue reading
A switch-case structure performs a complex decision in your code, similar to a cascade of if else-if else statements. The structure works like a comparison as a whole, acting upon single values or variables. But its construction need not lack expressions.
Continue reading
In last week’s Lesson, I lamented that C lacks a function to compare two floating point values based on a significant number of digits. Being a C programmer, I resolved this issue by writing a function that accomplishes this suddenly necessary task.
Continue reading
From last week’s Lesson, I plowed into a BASIC programming book I worked on 35 years ago. (Yes, I’m old.) In it, substitute code was offered for commands not available in every version of BASIC. To appreciate this necessity, understand that back in those days computers weren’t file-to-file compatible, so translating programming language dialects was part of the job.
Continue reading
The first part of my writing career began by updating a computer book bestseller, The BASIC Handbook. This tome served as a lexicon for the various BASIC programming language dialects, allowing users from one version of BASIC to translate and use code from another version.
Continue reading
Every so often I scour C library references, looking for fun or unusual functions. When I find one I’m unfamiliar with or something I’ve seldom used, I write about. After all, the functions do practical things that might be worthy of exploration. A recent example is gettimeofday().
Continue reading
Things were stable back in the old days. When I first coded C, a char was 8-bits (a byte), and an int was 16-bits. The short was also 16-bits and the long, it was truly long at 32-bits. Today, things aren’t as consistent.
Continue reading
After climbing the ternary I/O mountain, and crafting functions that both input and output base 3 values, the next step is obvious: Combine both functions into a single program. The step after that is less obvious: Change the code so that any base can be used to process input or generate output.
Continue reading
I’m happy I chose to write the function that consumes a ternary value last, shown in last week’s Lesson. The process turns out to be not that big of a deal, though trepidations scurried around me as I wrote the code.
Continue reading
I believe my approach was okay for generating ternary (base 3) numbers, but for some reason I couldn’t get my algorithm to work. From last week’s Lesson, here’s what I tried:
Continue reading