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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I’m certain that the nerds would love debating whether the telegraph’s Morse code system was the first binary communications network. Let them do so. Still, Morse code remains a simple communications system, translating letters and numbers into dots and dashes — which you could argue are similar to ones and zeros.
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When a computer program wants to know a Yes or No answer, the function I write is called yorn().
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This semester has been brutal! You’ve had five classes, three of which are required for your major and two electives that turned out to be tougher than you anticipated. Yet, you pulled through the term without dropping a single course. You now have your grades and want to know your GPA for the semester.
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What’s today?
The reply could be the day of a week, such as Sunday. That’s how I first answer the question. The more detailed answer is the day of the month, which isn’t often on my mind — unless it’s an important day like a birthday or some event.
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I’m not immersed in higher mathematics, therefore most of my programming puzzles tend to involve strings or other items I can easily comprehend. Beyond manipulating characters and strings, for my programming kung fu training I keep returning to the matrix or grid.
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It’s not that programmers are lazy. Many professions involve a lot of copy-and-paste, borrowing stuff done before, re-purposing and re-using. Why re-invent the wheel? Still, doing so helps exercise your programming kung-fu as well as offers insights into how things work and why some operations are done the way they are.
As an example, consider the atoi() function.
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This month’s Exercise is based on code presented in the June 1 Lesson: split a string into separate words. The difference is that each word you pluck from the string is followed by the number of letters in that word.
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In a recent Lesson, I explored upon the idea of creating binary math macros. This technique was popular in Assembly language programs where the processor lacks high order math functions, including basic multiplication and division. In C you can code one-line macros that mimic Assembly’s bit-shifting behavior required to multiply values.
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