Even when statistics has barely brushed by you on the subway, you probably know the term standard deviation. It refers to how data is distributed in a group, their distance from the mean. You can use your C programming kung fu to code the standard deviation of a data set, which is the challenge for this month’s Exercise.
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You can’t just slap a data type upon a variable declared as void. No, a void type can be assigned a pointer. But even then, you can’t just typecast that pointer as an int and get away with it.
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The four standard data types in C programming are char, int, float, and double. A fifth type is void, which is used to declare storage of an unknown type. My goal is to see how badly I can abuse this data type.
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Today marks this blog’s 11th anniversary. The first post was made 11 years ago on April 13th, 2013. This date coincided with the release of my book, Beginning Programming with C For Dummies.
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As with the select() function covered in last week’s Lesson, you can use other networking functions to scan for pending standard input while a program otherwise spins busy. The epoll() family of functions allow for such monitoring.
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This month’s Exercise may not have been challenging. Still, remember that blog is about learning the C language. Sometimes performing what could be a simple task may end up being complex than you anticipated.
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A network program monitors one or more file descriptors (such as sockets) for activity. It reacts when information is ready to process. This technique can also be applied to keyboard input, though not as elegantly as the kbhit() function shown in last week’s Lesson.
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I started my technology writing career at a computer book publishing house, CompuSoft. It’s no longer around, but I do recall ghost writing books such as the BASIC Handbook, which was an encyclopedia of the BASIC programming language. The first command listed in this book was ABS.
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The C language is famously platform independent. This feature may seem unimportant these days, but back in the early computer era having a language you code code on multiple systems was key to the C language’s success. This benefit may be one reason why C lacks a specific function to check on the keyboard status to determine whether a key has been pressed. Such a function is hardware-dependent.
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Suppose you must write code that remains busy while checking to see whether a key has been pressed. The program repeats a loop, performing various tasks, but eager for that key press. When a key is pressed, the code fetches the key. Two things stand in your way to make this happen.
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