Sometimes programming can be a snap, especially when you have a known data set and pretty much all the values are static. You can whip out code right away, it runs well and looks beautiful — but that’s because everything is known. The fewer variables, the easier to code.
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Nested structures present another opportunity for pointers to growl in your code. The struggle is knowing which structure member operator to use — and where.
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Structures are the complex variable type in C, allowing you to craft data-rich units for storing and retrieving all sorts of interesting information. They’re fun! But like asterisks falling as snowflakes, sprinkle some pointers into a structure and you can get into trouble fast.
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I’m no math genius. I’d love to understand it all, and I appreciate the complexities, but I’m just the noob first-time player walking across a field in Call of Duty where I’m a target to all the more experienced players. In short: The study of compound interest eventually gives rise to the mathematical concept of e, also known as Euler’s number.
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Unwinding percent-encoding involves three steps:
+ back into a space.You would think that simple interest (from last week’s Lesson) would be enough. After all, if you’re investing, you make money; if you’re paying back a loan, you can figure the math. That aspect of interest wasn’t enough for mathematical and banking geniuses, who devised a second type of interest calculation, which is “interest on the interest.”
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Last month’s Exercise was to write a filter that converts ASCII text into a percent-encoded format. This month, you’re task is to reverse the process: White a filter that converts a percent-encoded string back into the original ASCII.
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I’m frustrated, as are many investors, at the lack of interest generated in “savings” accounts these days. It’s pitiful. The interest formula is based on solid mathematics, which is easy to code in C. Doing so may help you understand the concept of interest and how it works.
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The Change Due Exercise, presented earlier this year, offered a solution that uses the fmod() function. That function is to real numbers as the modulus operator is to integers, though it’s not a straight-across comparison. That’s because floating point numbers can be imprecise.
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The C language offers some delicious predicaments you may not find in other languages. Many of these odd situations involve variables, which are strongly typed in other languages. As a case in point, consider the difference between an empty string and a null string.
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