I think most kids delight at discovering the palindrome, where a word or phrase contains the same letters read forward or backwards. For example, racecar, which is really two words but never mind! Imagine how such fun can be spoiled by applying the same rule to a number.
Continue reading
Oh, leave it to the propeller heads to devise a clever and fun name for something the rest of us never pay attention to. This time it’s a cyclops number, which is any decimal integer value with an odd number of digits and a big fat zero in the middle — like a cyclops’ eye.
Continue reading
Here’s an easy exercise to try, something for those first learning C programming but also a challenge for experienced users: Output the alphabet A to Z in both upper and lowercase letters. It’s an “easy” exercise only when you don’t explore the possibilities.
Continue reading
Padding a string on its left side isn’t that difficult, yet it’s a vital piece of code. To understand why, you need to know that the initialism NPM stands for Node Package Manager. It’s a critical part of the Internet.
Continue reading
I recently stayed at a resort with a tall hotel tower, over 30 stories. As I rode the elevator up to my floor, I thought about how the lift worked like a pointer traversing an array: The floors are elements. Each stop going up represents a passenger’s desired destination, as do stops on the return trip. My programmer brain was on fire!
Continue reading
A floating point, or real number, has two parts: Before the decimal comes the integer part. After the decimal is the fractional part. Sometimes it’s necessary to split such a value, so that your code can deal separately with the integer and fractional parts.
Continue reading
When I sought to write my own square root function back in 2020, I based it on a series of steps from the math.com website. I figured, “Hey! These guys are math nerds. They know their stuff.” Turns out, the ancient Babylonians beat them to the punch — and have a better method for calculating a square root.
Continue reading
Recently, I wrote code to calculate odds. The program’s output listed the odds as a fraction, such as 1/6 for rolling a specific number on a die. But occasionally, the output is something like 7/21. As a human, and after a modicum of mental sweat, I recognize 7/21 as 1/3. The challenge is how to get the computer to recognize and report the smaller fraction.
Continue reading
‘
I have a smart microwave oven. Say I need to heat my tea for a minute and a half. I type in 90. When I press the Start button, the 90 transforms into 1:30, a minute thirty. It’s the same quantity of time, but expressed differently. Such magic is merely clever programming.
Continue reading
The task for last month’s Exercise was to encode a string. As you may have feared, the task for this month’s Exercise is to decode that string. Let me review:
Continue reading