The programming adventure is full of interesting twists and turns, and with each new puzzle comes multiple opportunities to flex your coding skills and devise new solutions. For this month’s Exercise, the task is to take an integer value and add up all its digits. The mathematical term for this operation is a digit sum.
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Not everything in the real world appreciates the holy computer numbers. These are binary values that parallel the powers of 2: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and so on.
A common computer puzzle is how to allocate storage specific to those holy numbers, especially when the sizes of items that you’re working with don’t exactly line up to a specific holy computer number.
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Computer games were simple back in the early days. Output was printed on a teletype or displayed on a text-only CRT. Input wasn’t interactive or real-time. These games were fun to play back then, but are kind of lame now. They still exist with regards to simple programming exercises. In fact, you can pound out a older type computer game in a few minutes if you know the basics of the C language.
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Here’s a thought experiment for you: How can you prompt a user to properly input a percentage value?
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Back in the day, computer programming courses offered predictable assignments. These were number-crunching exercises, which had little flash and, yes, were boring. Today you can plot graphics, manipulate sound, and explore the web with your code. Back then, you’d do something dull like calculate depreciation.
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Parsing is an activity that programmers are often reluctant to do themselves. That’s because parsing can be a real pain in the rump. Not only that, but why write your own function when you can use specific libraries that handle the job for you? That’s a blessing, but it won’t let you escape from attempting this month’s Exercise.
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The task is rather simple: Prompt the user to input a value between 1 and 9. If you’ve read the first few chapters of any of my For Dummies C programming books, you could do that one easily. But what happens when the user doesn’t type a value in that range or — worse — they type text instead?
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In my C programming books, I often use the directions on a shampoo bottle as an example of basic programming:
1. Lather.
2. Rinse.
3. Repeat.
Another real-life example of programming techniques happens in music. Specifically, cumulative songs are representative of loops. This type of song includes 99 Bottles of Beer and the holiday favorite, The Twelve Days of Christmas.
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Parsing is the process of sifting through a chunk of data to look for significant information. It’s a big topic.
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The Hailstone sequence is based on the theory is that you can perform a specific calculation on any positive integer to create a series of numbers. No matter which positive integer you start with, eventually the sequence ends with the value 1.
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