Better than forking — especially grandchild forking — is to use threads. These program chunks are more manageable than forking and they don’t recreate the entire program (process). Still, threads aren’t without their quirks. Further, they’re available only to the POSIX standard. Sorry, Windows.
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I wrote about forking a while back, in June 2015. The fork splits a program into two processes, each capable of handling different tasks simultaneously. The power behind this trick is the fork() function.
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The challenge for this month’s Exercise is to split a decimal value into its integer and fractional portions. But what if you need the fractional portion as a string?
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Cleaving a decimal value into its integer and fractional portions is a neat trick, one that relies upon C natural capability to thwack off the decimal portion of a float when it’s recast as an integer. Knowing about this conversion makes solving this month’s Exercise a whole lot easier.
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It was weird when I first saw it: A conditional expression used to determine a value. It sounds odd, but it works.
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A floating point, or real number, has two parts: Before the decimal comes the integer part. After the decimal is the fractional part. Sometimes it’s necessary to split such a value, so that your code can deal separately with the integer and fractional parts.
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Properly formed strings in C are terminated with the null character, \0. Accept it or die!
However . . .
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The critical issue about allocating and then freeing memory is to avoid a memory leak. This condition happens when a memory chunk gets lost, leaving the it lingering in RAM not doing anyone any good. Most often a memory leak occurs in a function.
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One criticism I receive is that my code examples, from both my online training material as well as in my C programming books, fail to free any allocated memory before the program quits. This assertion is correct, and I have a darn good reason why!
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The first post on this blog was made on April 13, 2013.
