It’s pretty safe to avoid your first instinct when it comes to dividing two integers. That first instinct is most likely to typecast the int values as float. That works, and many times it can be the best solution, but it’s not always the solution.
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Data is is just data. Organize that data and it becomes information. When it comes to organizing data in the C language, the first tool you probably learned was the array.
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The unary * operator is used both to declare a pointer and access the value at that pointer’s location. When the value is the address of another pointer, two * unary operators are used. When the value is the address of an address of an address of an address, then four * unary operators are used. I kid you not.
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The pointer-to-a-pointer variable does have a purpose, but fortunately it’s a very specific and rare purpose. And, no, that purpose isn’t to make you wish you had learned to program in Java.
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The ** notation can really make a beginning C programmer blanch. In fact, a lot of Java programmers probably fled from the C language just after the initial lesson on pointers. They’d turn to stone even to glance at a variable like **blorf. You don’t need to cower under a desk with those people.
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Here’s a scary thing for most people: **blorf. No, not the name blorf, although it’s one of my favorite made-up words. What drives programmers insane — and all programmers, not just C programmers — are those double disaster asterisks.
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It’s all come to this: Gathering up the individual functions necessary to code a program that outputs the current month, formatted, with the proper number of days for February. Coincidentally, this post is published in February.
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Centering text is one of those basic things many programmer’s have to deal with. Yet once you write the function, you might forget about something I called bounds checking. After all, who would ever pass a string to a centering function where that string would be wider than the field in which it’s centered?
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Last week’s Lesson demonstrates a pretty decent calendar program. It works for every month of the year that has 31 days. Obviously that’s not every month, so more fine tuning must be done, especially to deal with the variable number of days in February.
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With an algorithm that properly returns the first day of the month, the next step in creating a calendar is to display that first week, and then all subsequent weeks. Sounds easy, right?
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