String input is a weird thing when it comes to wide characters, mostly because how the heck do you type wide characters in a terminal window beyond copy-and-paste?
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Programming is a fun hobby because once you unlock and open a door, you immediately find another locked door. Normal humans would experience frustration, but a good programmer enjoys a challenge and even sees the humor in the situation. A case in point is learning how to program wide characters in C: Once you think you’ve cleared a huge hurdle, you find another, taller one right behind it.
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After you set the necessary locale for your program, you’re free to use the wide character functions defined in the wchar.h header file. For some reason, this process is poorly-documented on the Internet, which is probably why you’re here.
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At the dawn of the microcomputer era, lowercase text was considered a big deal. That’s because many home computers at the time displayed only uppercase letters. Memory was tight. Full-ASCII character generators added to the system’s cost. Yes, a microcomputer that displayed lowercase text was a big deal.
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Division is the last of the four basic arithmetic operations taught. Addition is easiest, followed by subtraction. Multiplication is merely aggressive addition. Division is a weird un-multiplication combined with subtraction thing, which is probably why educators save the concept for last.
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A new operator was added to the C language in the last revision, one that I don’t cover in my books. (I’m not sure how that happened.) Anyway, it’s the Elvis operator. Unless you’re a fan of the ternary operator, you’ll probably never use it.
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Last week’s Lesson showed how to shift a column of numbers in an array grid. The array just happens to be a magic square. So the puzzle is to run the array through the confirm_magic() function, which was presented in a previous week’s Lesson. Seems easy.
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Before moving off the topic of arrays and their bogus dimensions, I want to play further with a magic square. Specifically, it intrigues me that you can shift rows or columns within the square and it doesn’t affect the magical properties.
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Suppose you have an array of integers which represents a magic square: All the rows and columns — even the two diagonals — add to the same total. To prove it, you create a function, confirm_magic() that processes the array and validates the math. You have just one problem . . .
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Multi-dimension array notation is just a handy shortcut for you, the human programmer. Internally, an array is a single-file line of values, one marching after another. The dimensional aspect helps humans organize the array’s data, but all that organization is superficial.
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