Long, long ago, I was an ardent assembly language programmer. I admired coding in assembly because the programs were small and fast. On the early microcomputers, that was a plus.
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Sure, your programs can accept values from the input stream, but most of the time numeric input comes in the form of text. The issue then becomes how to transform the string “1234” into the value 1234.
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Here’s a brain puzzle for you: Write a function that accepts a numeric array and returns the high and low values from that array. Can it be done?
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01010011011000010111100100100000010010010111010000100000
01101001011011100010000001000010011010010110111001100001
011100100111100100001010
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The C language library features a few rounding functions, but most of them deal with trimming floating point values down (or up) to integers. The other day I encountered an interesting problem: How to round a value up or down to the nearest value of 5.
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The fgets() function is a marvelous tool for reading chunks of text from the keyboard or standard input. One problem I have with it is that it also reads the Enter key press, sticking a \n into the string. That’s not a big issue, however, because you can easily pull out that character.
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Most C programmers know the sleep() function, which pauses program execution for a given number of seconds. Seconds are a vast chunk of time, especially in a computer where things happen quickly. So a desire exists for a function that delays execution for smaller slices of time. For that duty you’ll need to code your own function, similar to the delay() function I use.
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The three standard I/O devices are stdin, stdout, and stderr. They represent the devices for standard input, standard output, and standard error messages. While you might see plenty of examples of stdin and stdout, examples of stderr are less common, although they don’t have to be.
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