The solution this month’s Exercise isn’t that complex, but it was handy in disproving a theory.
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This month’s Exercise wasn’t astronomically difficult, but I did spend some time devising a solution. My goal was to try to avoid writing a nested loop. This goal proved unattainable.
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The challenge for this month’s Exercise is not only to calculate Euler’s number, e, but to count how many loops a program must endure before your e value calculation matches the defined constant M_E. I hope you didn’t find this challenge too difficult.
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The insidious part of this month’s Exercise is writing a function that doesn’t count a stalemate as a win. It’s what happened to me for my first draft of a solution.
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The challenge for this month’s Exercise is to determine whether an integer, 1 to 100, is divisible by nine or contains the digit ‘9’. It seems like an easy puzzle for a C programmer to solve, but what I found interesting was crafting the output — specifically when a number both contains ‘9’ and is divisible by nine.
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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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