I remember the first time I heard the puzzle: If you’re paid a penny on the first day, doubled on the second day, and doubled every day after, by the end of the month you’d be a millionaire many times over. This concept is mind boggling.
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I would guess that most beginning programmers can deftly craft a loop that outputs sequential integer values, say from 0 to 100. In fact, this is the type of code I write whenever I learn a new language. I asked myself, “Can I write a loop to output values 0 to 100?” Usually in no time, I’ve constructed such a program. Simple.
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I enjoy playing number games. I’m not good at it, but I enjoy playing them. Recently such a game piqued my curiosity enough to consider it for my monthly C For Dummies exercise: 21
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After a few intermediate to advanced Exercises, I decided to try something that’s a little easier this month. Still, even if you’re a pro, it helps to pull back and try something basic just to see what you can do with it.
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I enjoy reading about and studying mathematics. One of my favorite books is A History of π. I’ve used this book to inspire my Pi Day (March 14) programs. It’s fascinating stuff.
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This month’s Exercise may seem like a repeat of the Exercise “We Have a Winnah!” from July of 2013. It’s not.
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Like many innocent and silly math games, No Nines is nerdy to play but fun to code. The game works like this:
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One of the many, useful tools a programmer must have is a hexdump utility. The utility consumes a file’s raw bytes and outputs them in a human-readable manner. By examining the dump, you can determine if file contains the proper data in the correct format, as well as do other interesting, useful, and technerd things.
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Last month, I published a post of the classic programming chestnut, a number-guessing game. In the post, I wrote: “Variable tries is set equal to 6 because I read somewhere that it’s possible to guess a value between 1 and 100 in six or fewer tries (though I’m probably incorrect).” And, yes, I was wrong.
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Recently, I wrote a utility that required the final line of text in a file to terminate with a special code. The code had to sit at the end of a line of text, not on a blank line. What I discovered is that many text files end with one or more blank lines.
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