I’ve covered the miraculous qsort() function elsewhere in this blog. It’s nifty, allowing you to sort all kinds of data with your only job being to code a compare() function. Most coders these days just copy-paste this function and call it good. But for sorting an array of structures, more brain muscle is required.
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Text mode need not be so dreary when it comes to generating a game of chess. You have several options, all of which stink to varying degrees.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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