Probability. Odds. These are words I often confuse, but the similarity relates to how often things happen. The gold standard is the flip of a coin: two possibilities, heads or tails. If you don’t understand how it works, you can write code to drive home the point.
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When I was working on last month’s Exercise, I scoured the C library for a function that returned the number of specific characters found in a string. The closest I could find was strchr(), which returns the location of a given character in a string. You can set this function in a loop to find subsequent characters, but what I needed was a tally, a total count of all matching characters in the string.
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The Great Coding Wars host many battles. For example, VIM versus Emacs (add in Nano for extra military action). Also the fight between spaces and tabs for indenting. Add to these conflicts a minor skirmish: whether to use camelCase or snake_case naming conventions.
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Yes, this Exercise has been done before. But back then, exactly seven years ago, I had the digits reduced further so that the result was a single digit. This time, your goal is to tally the digits in an integer and report the results — no reductions!
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The classic paradigm for swapping values between two variables involves using a third variable. But is the third variable even necessary?
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The time.h header defines a handful of functions useful for discovering and manipulating today’s date. Especially the localtime() function, which translates a time_t (Unix Epoch) value into date fields for output or manipulation. It’s a wonderful tool, but what does it tell you about yesterday?
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The file utility in Linux quickly identifies known file types. It identifies text files, graphics images, or other common file types by using some sort of magic beyond checking the filename extension (which isn’t a guarantee). You can employ similar sorcery by writing your own Is It ASCII program.
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You have a number of options for merging values between two arrays. I suppose the solution you devise depends on how you interpret the word “merge.”
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A for loop statement contains three parts: initialization, termination, and while-looping. If you omit any part, the compiler assumes the value one, or TRUE, as the value, so the statement for(;;) becomes an endless loop. The opposite of omitting is loading up: You can state multiple initialization and while-looping expressions in the statement, which can make a for loop truly compact.
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The stat() function returns various tidbits about a file, including its timestamp, permissions, file type, and the file’s size in bytes. This value can also be obtained without without using the stat() function, which is this month’s Exercise.
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