Filters are fun to code and useful, such as the more filter in Linux that pages text output. For this month’s Exercise, your task is to write a text reversing filter. This program is a bit more challenging than coding other types of filters.
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I watched the film Contact a few weeks ago. The movie is about first contact with an alien civilization. It’s smart cinema, which offers that communications between species would be mathematical in nature, as math is the universal language.
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Here is an issue that crops up often in programming, specifically when outputting data in a series: How do you separate items in the series and not make the last item look dorky? It’s tricky.
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Loops are fun. They’re easy to learn. But not everything that repeats in a C program is constructed as a loop.
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One of the most clever string functions is strstr(), which searches for one string within another. Because of its return value — a char pointer — it’s possible to call this function multiple times to continue searching through the string.
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Pointers can drive C programmers mad. In fact, I’d say that evidence of this notion is that the most experienced C programmers have an air of insanity about them. To join their club, try working this month’s Exercise.
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I think any kid learning math in school knows what a remainder is, but few understand (or are taught) what a modulus is. It obtains the remainder of one value divided by another, specifically a larger value divided by a smaller value. In C programming, the % (modulo) operator performs this calculation. But what if the C language lacked a modulo operator?
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It’s common in programming to use a factorial as a way to teach about recursion. For example, 5! (five factorial) is 5×4×3×2×1, which is 120. Calculating this result can be done with a recursive function, which is practical and satisfying. But mathematicians have a twisted sense of humor, so they invented something called a double factorial.
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I remember memorizing the “times tables,” which is how most American kids learn to multiply. Committing single digit multiplication values to memory helps perform multiplication and division problems, but it’s not the only way to calculate the result.
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The task for last month’s Exercise was to describe complex data — a matrix. For this month’s Exercise, your task is to multiply these matrixes.
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