Among the C language’s slender assortment of keywords you find goto. It’s a branching statement, which can be used to loop or to escape from some ugly programming knot. Regardless, you’re told early on in your C language education that you must avoid this keyword at all costs! That is, unless you want to try this month’s exercise.
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The final step of the pointer storage program is to add data to the various buffers, or “sticks,” where ten integer values are stored. This step involves ugly double-pointer notation. If you can, please review last week’s Lesson to get up to speed on how storage is allocated and how these pointers are managed.
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Expanding an allocated buffer is something you can do with a pointer, but not with an array. This flexibility is why I encourage all C language students to understand and use pointers, though it doesn’t make the concept nay less onery.
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Perhaps the most difficult part of learning C is understanding and coding pointers. Even when you have a grip on things, it helps to keep fresh and practice new and utterly obnoxious ways to play with pointers.
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The challenge for this month’s Exercise is to code Heron’s Formula. This geometric magic calculates the area of a triangle given the length of each of its three sides.
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From last week’s Lesson, the task is to code a safer, better version of the strcpy() function. The goals are to check buffer size, report an overflow or underflow (buffer is too big or too small), and potentially confirm whether data is overwritten. Such a program is often used as a test when applying for a C programming job.
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The only aspect of math I enjoyed in school was geometry. Trigonometry was a close second. I found the study fascinating and did well; I received a B in that class as opposed by my usual C- or D.
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The C language has string manipulation functions, but they’re tepid. In fact, the C23 update includes even more functions to duplicate strings and to stick them together. These actions are simple in other languages, but create such a problem for C that coding a string copying function is often a skill you must demonstrate when applying for a C programming job.
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You’ve crafted a brilliant function, ensuring that it properly processes words and generates needed output. Is the code perfect? Well, it looks perfect. But how do you know for certain?
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I’ll be blunt: If you want to pass an array to a function, or have a function return an array, just give up now and use pointers. It’s a far easier operation, and it would save me the bother of having to write this post to further discuss the topic of array decay.
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