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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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.
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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:
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Here is your message:
48190F0009A72827FDFDFBFD18FAAD460CFDFEB323EA192903BB1731F800FCFC0E97
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I enjoy programming tables, rows and columns. The standard technique is to use a nested loop. In fact, when teaching nested loops, outputting a table is par for the course.
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The goal of the November 2018 Exercise on this blog was to count in “alphabedecimal,” or base 26 using the uppercase letters of the alphabet. The solution cycles from AAAA to ZZZZ flipping each character (or digit) one at a time, just as numbers are counted. The challenge is to do so without employing a nested loop.
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Most functions are nice to strings. They manipulate the characters in a useful or clever way, returning an important value or an updated version of the text. But not every string function needs to be so kind, such as the one you write for this Exercise.
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Every coder needs an ASCII table. Even back in the old days, when I memorized such things as the Escape character was equal to 27 decimal, 0x1b hex, and had the keyboard shortcut ^[, I would glance at the ASCII table poster hanging on the wall to confirm that I was using the proper values in my code. And the poster looked cool.
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