To assemble all the bit field manipulation functions into one program, I present the status portion of what could be a complex computer game. The bit fields represent the current conditions of the game’s starship. The fields are adjusted as the game progresses and various things happen.
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Once you break out the tools, bit manipulation in C can be a fascinating and useful thing. Setting a bit, covered in last week’s Lesson, is a big first step. Once you’ve done that, the functions to read and set a bit fall into place naturally.
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One of the things I enjoy about coding defensive input is that I get to think about all the oddball possibilities. Users can type anything, which is something you must always anticipate. For typing in a percentage value, the door for whacky input is left wide open.
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The three basic bit manipulation operations are:
The standard C library lacks specific functions to carry out these bit manipulations, and I haven’t checked to see whether a third party library is available. That’s because you can easily code these operations on your own.
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Here’s a thought experiment for you: How can you prompt a user to properly input a percentage value?
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One of the C language’s strengths is that it can venture down into the depths of a computer’s inner workings. It loves to play in those dark, subterranean pools of raw data, bits, ports, and other primitive places that few high-level languages dare to tread.
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Of course recursion is scary! At no other time in your programming career is your code more susceptible to stack overflows, which appear on the screen as ugly system errors when the code runs. I find that exciting.
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Recursion is a type of programming loop, one that’s deliberately designed to drive some programmers nuts. It’s also a great way to replace nested loops, such as those used in last week’s Lesson.
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This month’s Exercise is one of those old, programming warhorses: Calculate a depreciation schedule. At the simplest level, the solution is a mathematical loop and keeps subtracting a given percentage from a value.
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If Arthur C. Clarke’s story The Nine Billion Names of God were true, then it seems rather pointless to plow through all 9,000,000,000 permutations to find one matching name. In fact, the exercise is more like a brute-force password cracking program than some celestial name search. What if the monks already knew the name? That would save time and effort.
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