Modern programming languages have libraries rich with routines, functions, and methods — plenty to pull together and craft the code you want without getting into the nitty-gritties or reinventing the wheel. As a mid-level language, C often requires that you craft your own functions, a task I undertake with eager glee.
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It’s Christmas time, nerds rejoice! Welcome this festive season with a bit of programming acumen to festoon your old CRT monitor with some yuletide cheer.
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No, a tick separator isn’t something you use on your dog during the summer. Instead, you find it in the upcoming C23 standard. A tick separator helps visually split up a long number, making it easier to read your code.
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One thing I take for granted is which C standard I’m using. The differences between the versions are subtle, and the compiler chooses its standard by default. But this choice can be altered for compatibility or historical reasons.
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The task for this month’s Exercise is to extract a structure member from a void pointer for use in the quick-sort compare() function. This isn’t a solution you can readily find on the Interwebs.
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The task is truly complex: Navigating a knight around a chessboard, visiting each square but never the same square twice. It took me a while to code, and I don’t think my solution is particularly elegant, but it works.
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I’ve covered the miraculous qsort() function elsewhere in this blog. It’s nifty, allowing you to sort all kinds of data with your only job being to code a compare() function. Most coders these days just copy-paste this function and call it good. But for sorting an array of structures, more brain muscle is required.
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I first read about the Knight’s Tour when I was a kid. My mom bought the Time Life series of books on computers. It it, the Knight’s Tour program is presented, which fascinated me. After all this time, I finally set out to code the tour myself.
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The next step in hopping a knight around a chessboard is determining which squares from its current position represent valid moves. Code must be combined from last week’s lesson (setting the knight on the chessboard at a random spot) with the movement code presented a few lessons back.
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Continuing from last week’s Lesson, the task is now to combine the chessboard output from this month’s Exercise solution with the knight’s random location. This step is the next one leading to the result, which is to plot how a knight moves on a chessboard.
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