The C language comes with a variety of data types that hold integer (whole number) values. But each type is limited by its size. The issue is to ensure that whatever value the program is manipulating never exceeds the given size.
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One of the weaknesses of the C language when measured against the newer, trendier programming languages is that it lacks a Boolean type. That is, a variable that’s either one or zero. This issue was addressed with the C99 standard and its addition of the underscore _Bool data type. It’s furthered in the C23 standard with the (better) bool type as well as the true and false keywords available in just about every other programming language used today. It’s time for a deep dive into the binary pool of bool.
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Having two file descriptors available to access the same file might seem redundant. In a way it is. It’s like having two sets of keys to a car: Yes, one could be a backup, but it’s more common that two different people are using the same car. But first, an example is necessary.
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One of C library functions I find most odd is dup(). I pronounce this function as if it rhymes with cup. I assume others may pronounce it like doop, which rhymes with poop. Whatever. The key is what the function does and how it could even remotely be necessary.
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The topic for this month’s Exercise is to code a recursive function that solves the Ramanujan Nested Radical, illustrated in Figure 1. Remember that Ramanujan created and solved this puzzle in his head. #genius
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About six years ago, I wrote about opening a file in the raw. Specifically, using the open() function to access file data at a low level. This approach uses file descriptors (integers) to track file I/O as opposed to the file handles used by the high-level fopen() family of functions. It turns out that you can do more with raw file access than just read and write data.
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Srinivasa Ramanujan was a mathematician of the genius variety in that he did amazing things in his short lifetime. The man was insanely brilliant. In fact, he struggled to get other mathematicians to understand his work because it was so unfamiliar. Anyway, he concocted the thing shown in Figure 1, which is one of many Ramanujan Nested Radicals:
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The for keyword opens the door to looping in C, as well as in other programming languages. When teaching this concept, I keep the for loop format simple. After all there’s a lot of cryptic stuff between those parenthesis. And — brace yourself — there’s room for a lot of other stuff as well.
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Anyone who’s programmed in C for a while has worked with other libraries. In Linux, it’s common to link in the math library, libm.a. Other libraries are available to expand what the C language can do. I have books available on Ncurses, curl, XML and JSON, each of which has a library that makes it easy to use these powerful utilities. But what about making your own library?
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As I plow the digital seas, I often come across a piece of programming flotsam worthy of investigation. Most of it is obfuscated C, which is delightful. The obfuscated code that outputs something wonderful is most entertaining. But every so often I stumble upon something perplexing like the following code:
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