I hope you enjoyed crafting your solution for this month’s Exercise. It’s just for fun, as I assume no one is going to mess with C to such a degree that their code becomes so completely unrecognizable. Still, C coders are a mischievous bunch.
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The C11 standard added the “underscore” bunch to the C language’s traditional keywords:
_Alignas
_Alingof
_Atomic
_Bool
_Complex
_Generic
_Imaginary
_Noreturn
_Static_assert
_Thread_local
I don’t routinely use any of these in my programs, beyond trying a few out to see how they work. The _Bool keyword comes in handy. The rest? Well, they’re worth exploring from a curiosity standpoint. For this week’s Lesson, I reveal the mysteries of the _Generic keyword.
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The C compiler preprocessor is a sneaky and powerful thing. I’m unsure of any other programming languages that have such a tool.
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My approach for initializing a buffer is to use a loop and assign each byte a value such as zero or the null character, '\0'. It’s tedious, but necessary. And for the impatient, some functions are available to perform this task for you.
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When my code requires a random odd buffer, I generally assign it a given size in some holy computer value: 16, 32, 64, and so on. But a defined constant exists, BUFSIZ, that can also be used to set a buffer size safely and consistently on all C compilers.
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The defined constant NULL represents a null or empty pointer. I’ve written before that the constant isn’t defined as zero, though such an assumption could lead you into trouble.
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Today marks 8 years that this blog has been online. The first post was made April 13, 2013. The blog was up for a few months before the book C Programming For Dummies was released. This way material would be available for the first readers.
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Mathematicians truly enjoy doing their math thing. As a mortal human, I don’t have a spot for math things on my “fun” spectrum. Yet, one of the more jolly things the math nerds do is discuss the value zero.
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I hope you had a wee bit of a struggle with your solution to this month’s Exercise. It involves a lot of decisions and proper steps in the right order to hold off on debits so that the bank account never dips below zero.
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I recall the math class where negative numbers were introduced. I was appalled. From Star Trek, I easily accepted the concept of antimatter, but the notion of negative values deeply offended me.
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