When I recently researched byte-flipping on the Internet, I was surprised that the solution I used back in the 1980s wasn’t listed among the top solutions available today. That’s probably because my brain thinks like an Assembly Language programmer, so I crafted a low-level solution.
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One of the first programming puzzles I solved on my own was a byte flip. That’s the process for taking a binary value and flipping it: You transpose bits 0 through 7 to bits 7 through 0. This is a puzzle that comes up frequently in programming, but one for which no single solution is preferred.
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As an example of how a binary values can hold fractions, I’ve concocted a simple real number format: An 8-bit value with 4 bits representing the whole number portion and 4 bits representing the fractional portion. Here’s how it looks:
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Over the past few weeks, I’ve covered the concept of negative integers and their representation as binary values. What can also be represented in binary, something that’s even less obvious than negative values, are fractions.
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The far left bit in a signed integer value — no matter how wide the integer — is the sign bit. If it’s set, the value is negative. Otherwise, the value is positive. But the sign bit is more than just a minus sign. It also plays into binary math.
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In the C language, you have several ways to create a negative integer: You can assign a negative value to a variable, you can perform math that results in a negative value, or you can manipulate bits to convert a positive value to a negative one. That final operation isn’t as easy as it sounds.
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Many first-time programmers rush over variable type descriptions and head full-bore into coding. That’s fine. I did it. You probably did it. But eventually you encounter code that doesn’t work properly because of negative numbers. That’s when you go back and review the concept of negative integer variable types.
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String storage is one of those frustrating things in the C language. Specifically, it’s that null character, \0, that appears at the end of every string. Is that character counted when you input a string? Copy a string? Create storage for a string? It’s a mystery that could drive you nuts.
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When I first learned the C language, I was surprised to find something missing from its assortment of operators. The +, -, *, and / operators are pretty common for nearly all programming languages. And you’ll find the % and ! operators used for modulus and logical NOT in a few programming languages. Yet what other languages have that C lacks is an exponent or power operator.
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The common way for humans to describe a file is to use its name. You refer to hello.txt as a file. The fopen() function C uses this nomenclature, which is handy and convenient. While a program runs, however, a file number is assigned to an open file.
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