Back in the bad old days, you used a terminal connected to a mainframe to do your computer work. The terminal had a monitor and keyboard and just enough smarts to configure itself for communications with the mainframe. One of those configuration options was character echo.
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The prompt appears in the terminal window: Type your password. As you type the password, text doesn’t appear on the screen. Yes, the program is using stream I/O. So how do you code standard input that doesn’t output characters?
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I’m constantly on the prowl for obscure and seldom-used C language functions and techniques. One I just discovered — despite coding in C for decades — is the token paste operator. It’s a weirdo.
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I had a great time coding Hunt the Wumpus. Like most programming challenges, it was fun, exciting, and frustrating all at once. Some code ran beautifully the first time. Other code contained silly mistakes that bogged me down. And solutions unveiled themselves magically like a sugar cube dissolving in water.
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In the climatic scene of the movie Wargames, the WOPR computer plays Tic-Tac-Toe. A question is asked, “Can the computer play itself?” This postulation forms the basis of all computer learning, but that wasn’t the puzzle for this month’s Exercise.
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In last week’s Lesson, I described the history and gameplay for the classic text mode game, Hunt the Wumpus. The task of coding the game took considerably longer than writing the blog post.
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Last month, I published a post of the classic programming chestnut, a number-guessing game. In the post, I wrote: “Variable tries is set equal to 6 because I read somewhere that it’s possible to guess a value between 1 and 100 in six or fewer tries (though I’m probably incorrect).” And, yes, I was wrong.
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The game Hunt the Wumpus isn’t difficult to code in C. In fact, all you need do is start with the basic number-guessing game presented in last week’s Lesson and you can build just about any text-mode game. That’s what I did when I started my own C language version of Hunt the Wumpus.
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I was perusing Rosetta Code the other day, looking for more programming ideas to explore. One of the tasks provided, with examples in a variety of programming languages, was to code the old computer game Hunt the Wumpus.
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If you desire to store formatted output in a buffer, the snprintf() function, covered in last week’s Lesson, is a safe alternative to the standard Library sprintf() function. An even better choice is the asprintf() function.
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