[NSRCA-discussion] Chapter-12 computer science.

[Martin X. Moleski, SJ]

Matthew Frederick wrote:

> Well, num increments before cnt does, so num would reach 256 as well ...

I don't have a C compiler to play with and it's been ~20 years
since I did.

Arguing from pseudo-language, I read the function as saying,
"If the counter is less than 256, then increment the number by one.
Increment the counter and repeat the if-then branch until the
count is equal to 256."

I can write the function in other languages than C (Pascal,
PHP, Javascript; I threw away my assembly-language books with
a sigh this year, so I probably couldn't come up with
working code, but back in the 80s I monkeyed around with
some assembly language for a couple of projects.

> ... I still don't like the example, I hate the thought of
> using characters for numbers. 

The bits are all the same.  The question is how we want
to interpret them: -127, 0xFF, chr(255), 255.  It's an
amazing system.

> ... Just seems silly to me. Then again, it's the 
> exact kind of thing my old computer science teacher would have put on a test 
> just to mess with everyone. Then again he would throw something in there 
> that looked like nothing but a string of ampersands and asterisks with a 
> one-letter variable at the end and ask if it was a pointer or not... he was 
> kind-of nuts.

Yup.  I've seen those kinds of challenges.  I can't
make heads or tails of them.  I got hooked on Turbo
Pascal when it first came out and have had trouble
reading C and its derivatives for a long time.  I'm
making a little progress nowadays.

				Marty