I learned to program on a microcomputer, a gizmo radically different in software and hardware design from today’s systems. An example of this difference is that if you wanted to write code that paused for a second, you wrote a for loop delay. Such a thing is obnoxiously impractical today — which sounds like a dare!
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Yet another fun way to mess with a matrix is to add its values to those in another matrix, creating a wonderful third matrix of the sums. Not everyone is going to agree that this notion is “fun.”
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This month’s Exercise is about coding a merge() function, which swallows two arrays and generates a third as output. The new array is “zippered” from the original arrays, alternating values from each.
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Data in a matrix is entertaining and all that, but the point is usually to manipulate that data. The most basic form of manipulation I can conjure is to tally the rows and columns. Sounds like fun, but it took me a few attempts to get the code correct.
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You have a number of options for merging values between two arrays. I suppose the solution you devise depends on how you interpret the word “merge.”
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Grids, or matrixes, are a common data thingy, as information often appears in tables. Being able to fold, spindle, and mutilate a grid is a common computer programming task, something to entertain your idle hours even if you have no pressing need to manipulate a matrix.
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In last week’s Lesson, I covered a function present in other programming languages but absent in C: concatenating arrays. This time, the topic is similar: adding two arrays. Yes, such functions exist in other languages, but in C you must write one yourself.
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Yet another tool missing from C, but found in other programming languages, is the capability to stick together two arrays. The result is a single, larger array containing the elements from the two originals. With C, of course, you can always code your own function to handle the task.
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I hope you were able to cram a lot of expressions into a for loop statement, which is the challenge for this month’s Exercise. Even if you know this trick, it’s important to understand it’s limitations — which is something I discovered during my research.
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I enjoy programming a computer the old fashioned way, in the text mode terminal window. Yes, it’s now a sad little “app” floating on a graphical screen. This burden doesn’t remove the charm, but it does raise an interesting issue when you try to get text mode output just right: How many rows and columns are there in the terminal window?
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