Just as it’s possible to rotate elements in an array, shuffling them all up a notch and moving the first element to the end, it’s also possible to flip an array, reversing the order of its elements.
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You wait all day in line — you know, one of those bureaucratic government things — only to get to the front of the line and discover that you’re missing something. So back to the end of the line you go, ready to toil all over again. Sound familiar? But a computer wouldn’t care.
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For whatever reason, it’s your desire to split a real number into its integer and fractional parts. Perhaps you’re angry with the value. Regardless, I can think of a few ways to perform this feat, but need not exercise a single brain cell in this effort as the modf() function performs the task automagically.
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If you’ve tried your computer’s patience, you may have encountered some valid yet odd results when doing math. For example, you may see NaN output, which is computer-speak for “Not a number.” Or perhaps you’ve encountered INF, infinity. The C library offers a way to test for these results before they’re output.
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It’s easy to explain the bsearch() function when using integers. One step up is to search for strings, covered in last week’s Lesson. At the pinnacle of insanity, however, is searching through an array of structures.
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When learning the bsearch() function, it helps to start with integers, as demonstrated in last week’s Lesson. When the data is more complex, however, additional programming kung-fu is required to sort and search. The first hill to climb in this adventure is to hunt down a string.
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Computer scientists, as well as various professionals wearing white lab coats, have determined that searching for data top-to-bottom is slow and clunky. Therefore, they devised a better, more logical way to search: The binary search.
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Finding things is an unwanted pastime for humans. “Where are the good scissors?” “Who has seen the cat?” “What happened to all my money?” These issues don’t exist for a program that dutifully locates any data tidbit without complaint. Finding the smallest needle in the largest haystack isn’t an issue for a computer.
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Programming language more modern than C sport great libraries of functions, or “methods.” Java has so many I doubt that a single programmer knows them all. In C, however, when a function is absent (and a lot of them are, comparably), you must code your own. Such is the case with building a string.
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The final step in my Pig Latin journey is to process an entire English language sentence. The piglatin() function, finished in last week’s Lesson, requires no updates. But chopping a sentence into words and sending them off to be processed individually proved to be an interesting exercise.
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