I enjoy studying foreign languages. A tool like Google Translate comes in handy, but it’s not perfect. That’s because computers translate words and phrases, but not the living, spoken language. Regardless, I thought I’d give language translation a stab, which got me into the topic of exploring arrays.
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\nThe easiest parts of speech to translate are nouns. These pair up fairly well between most languages. For example, numbers translate directly between all languages. But for my program, I sought to translate months of the year. The languages chosen are French and English, one of which I speak fairly well.<\/p>\n
Before my brain entangled itself in the process of how to input a word from one language and output its foreign tongue complement, I first wanted to output the names of months as they pair up.<\/p>\n
\r\n#include <stdio.h>\r\n#include <string.h>\r\n\r\n#define MONTHS 12\r\n\r\nint main()\r\n{\r\n const char *english[MONTHS] =\r\n {\r\n \"January\", \"February\", \"March\", \"April\",\r\n \"May\", \"June\", \"July\", \"August\", \"September\",\r\n \"October\", \"November\", \"December\"\r\n };\r\n const char *french[MONTHS] =\r\n {\r\n \"janvier\", \"fevrier\", \"mars\", \"avril\",\r\n \"mai\", \"juin\", \"jullet\", \"aout\", \"septembre\",\r\n \"octobre\", \"novembre\", \"decembre\"\r\n };\r\n int x;\r\n\r\n \/* output months *\/<\/span>\r\n for( x=0; x<MONTHS; x++ )\r\n printf(\"%s - %s\\n\", english[x], french[x]);\r\n\r\n return(0);\r\n}<\/pre>\nThe code hosts two arrays, english[]<\/code> and french[]<\/code>. Both are pointer arrays, each with MONTH<\/code> (12) elements in their annual order. These are constant arrays as their values don’t change, nor should they be changed due to the string-pointer declaration. (Relevant post<\/a>.)<\/p>\nThe for<\/em> loop processes the arrays and outputs the corresponding values:<\/p>\nJanuary - janvier
\nFebruary - fevrier
\nMarch - mars
\nApril - avril
\nMay - mai
\nJune - juin
\nJuly - jullet
\nAugust - aout
\nSeptember - septembre
\nOctober - octobre
\nNovember - novembre
\nDecember - decembre<\/code><\/p>\nUpon success, I sought to devise a translation function that would output the French month name when given the English month name. That’s where I stopped.<\/p>\n
My primitive attempts at translation work only when a link exists between the two arrays. In this Lesson’s code the link exists because each element in each array pairs up with the translated word. In the program I started to write, input is accepted and the offset passed to a function that returns the corresponding word. While this program worked, I found it to be unimpressive. It was a lot of code to do what something else could accomplish a lot easier.<\/p>\n
That something else, something that the C language is missing, is called an associative array<\/em>. I explore this concept in next week’s Lesson<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For each item in one array, a companion item is found in the second. Continue reading