The goal is to write code that generates random numbers, but never the same value twice. After all, if you’re coding a card game or generating lotto picks, it’s unrealistic to expect the same value appear multiple times.
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Last week’s Lesson discussed how to monitor random numbers by using an array: When a random value is drawn, it’s corresponding array element is incremented. By continuing that same thought, you can easily ensure that the same random number isn’t used when programming a card game. But first, the game itself!
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One of the most common questions I get from my For Dummies programming titles is regarding the lotto programs. That code demonstrates how you can randomly draw lotto balls without drawing the same ball twice.
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University professors will try to drive the point into your head all semester: NULL and zero are not the same thing! But yet, you’ve looked into memory, you’ve examined the code. That thing they call NULL sure does look like a zero! What’s the big difference?
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True is a logical condition. It’s often written TRUE just to confuse it with “true” which is a word that has other implications. But for programming, TRUE generally means success. It’s the opposite of FALSE, which generally means failure.
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The most basic and perhaps ancient of programming techniques is the loop. And the most basic loop is the for loop. It’s also pretty flexible.
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Long, long ago, I was an ardent assembly language programmer. I admired coding in assembly because the programs were small and fast. On the early microcomputers, that was a plus.
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Sure, your programs can accept values from the input stream, but most of the time numeric input comes in the form of text. The issue then becomes how to transform the string “1234” into the value 1234.
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Here’s a brain puzzle for you: Write a function that accepts a numeric array and returns the high and low values from that array. Can it be done?
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01010011011000010111100100100000010010010111010000100000
01101001011011100010000001000010011010010110111001100001
011100100111100100001010
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