I’ve been coding hexdump utilities since the microcomputer era. They’re just so handy, especially when writing structures or other formatted data to a file. The dump assists with debugging, and it helps you figure out some undocumented data structures as well.
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In the climatic scene of the movie Wargames, the WOPR computer plays Tic-Tac-Toe. A question is asked, “Can the computer play itself?” This postulation forms the basis of all computer learning, but that wasn’t the puzzle for this month’s Exercise.
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The problem with snipping blank lines from the end of a file is storing the file as it’s processed. At least that’s the issue I faced as I worked through my solution to this month’s Exercise.
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A Morse Code filter probably has no practical use, but it’s a good programming exercise. The issue is how to deal with undefined character codes and otherwise present the output. My solution for this month’s Exercise involves interpreting standard input, discarding undefined information, and sending the results to standard output in a format that isn’t ugly.
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The most difficult thing about this month’s Exercise is to deal with stream input: When the user overstuffs the input buffer, those extra characters continue to flow into the program, interpreted as additional input and they make the output look ugly.
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It’s fun supplying your own scores for a semester, which really helps boost your GPA! Still, the challenge for this Month’s Exercise was to input — and validate — a series of grades to calculate your GPA for five courses.
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One way to discover next Tuesday’s date is just to wait. You could code that solution in C, which would be silly, but I hope that you instead chose to use some time functions to derive your answer.
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The challenge for this month’s Exercise is to fill a grid with random letters, a to z, then rotate that grid on its side, counterclockwise, and display the results. Such fun.
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This month’s Exercise is to emulate the antique atoi() function, which converts a string of digits into an integer value.
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The key to making this month’s Exercise work isn’t to know when a word stops, but when the separator characters stop. That’s because words aren’t always separated by single characters.
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