One of those weirdo programming concepts university sophomore programming students eagerly avoid is the stack. It’s a type of storage with unique features, but it’s difficult to appreciate unless you understand its origins.
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Seriously, why do programmers need an abs() function? It’s available in just about every programming language; if you view an alphabetic list of functions, abs() is probably the first one. Yet, what’s the point of a function that simply converts negative values to positive values?
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Somewhere in my vast array of teaching material, I claimed that only for loops can be nested. That’s poppycock.
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I’m not a fan of the scanf() function, despite how handy it can be. It’s a great teaching tool, but for a program that accepts string input, you need to use fgets() instead. Still, scanf() can be used to read a string, providing that you know the whitespace requirements beforehand.
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I received a question on a looping variable and why its value after the loop isn’t the same as the ending value of the loop. It’s a puzzling issue I remember from when I first learned to program, but one that you can understand once you figure out what the loop does.
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To add more functionality to the C language, you mix in another library. The library contains routines (functions) that let you control specific hardware, manipulate data, work with graphics, and a host of other capabilities beyond the standard C library.
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I’ve not installed Code::Blocks on a Linux computer, but for a moment I’ll pretend that such an installation has the same issue I described in last week’s Lesson: You must manually link in the C language math library to create any program that uses a math.h function.
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Recently, I had question posed to from a reader from Norway. He was working his way through my book and found that one of the programs wouldn’t compile on his Linux computer. The problem was that the C language math library isn’t automatically linked. The effect is that a linker error appears upon compiling.
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Even when you add fudge to a matching system, occasionally that odd bit of data — the outlier — can wreck an otherwise close match. The question is, how many of those mismatches does your code allow?
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A fuzzy match that uses discrete amount of fudge might not yield a match, especially when the values cover a wide range. To better make the match work, set a percentage variation instead.
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