As a programmer, always be thinking: What can go wrong? What would be an exception? Where have I made assumptions? You can’t avoid bugs by making such challenges, but you can diminish their possibilities.
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In last week’s Lesson, I presented code that shows one way to wrap incoming streaming text. It’s not the easiest thing. Let me explain how last week’s code attempts to solve the problem.
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Unlike static text, streaming text feeds into a program one character at a time. To wrap that text, you need to know all the basics about wrapping text (covered in this Lesson), but also how to concoct a filter that buffers its output.
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When displaying a long string of text, it’s polite — and expected — for the programmer to wrap the text. Not wrapping the text would split words at the right margin, which irritates human readers to no end.
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Way back in the day, word wrap was fascinating. It was so unique that word processors boasted about it as a feature. I’m serious! That’s because a lot of the primitive (late 1970s and early 1980s) word processing programs did not wrap text at the end of a line. Strange, but true.
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Nothing can be more disconcerting than text lopped off before the end of the li
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A basic C language process is passing a value to a function. If you’re an old hand, you might say, “Yeah, well, so?” For a beginning programmer, however, functions and their arguments can be a confusing and intimidating ordeal.
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When you first learn the C language, and you’re practicing basic input/output, you become familiar with the two I/O workhorses of the C library: printf() and scanf(). Of the two, printf() is my favorite. The scanf() function is highly useful, and it’s a great learning tool, but it’s not the best function for reading in a string of text.
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This post marks one year of the Unofficial C For Dummies website blog. Yeah!
I started this blog before the book was published. I wanted to ensure that anyone who bought the book would actually have some content up and available should they click the link. And I wrote a few posts before hot-linking the blog, just to make it more lively.
It’s been fun working this blog for the past year. I look forward to many more posts in the future. If you have any questions on my programming books, please email me; my address is shown below.
And remember: You don’t need an account here to enjoy the posts. If you’d like an account, send email to dan@c-for-dummies.com and I’ll set you up. No problem!
You might think that the command line is a relic of the past. For a mortal user, that’s correct: The only people I know who still dwell at the command prompt are power users. I keep a command prompt (terminal) window open on my computers, just because using the terminal is fast and I happen to know the commands. Yet, internally, all graphical operating systems still reference the command line.
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