The vi/vim editor is arguably one of the most powerful text editors! But working with vi requires the usage of many commands. One of the first things we learnt in school was “A for Apple, B for Ball, C for Cat…”. It is time to relearn that if we have to work on vi! Now what we need to remember is “A for Append, B for Begin, C for Change…”. This is a fun article that helps you relearn A-Z!

continue reading "The A-Z of vi!"

After the successful completion of the 2-day hackathon, the team came out with a new web programming language (tentatively named WPL) that has significant advantages over the conventional method of programming for the web. A wiki is being created to show samples of WPL code and the generated HTML, and will be online shortly here.

The team that developed this:

Back row: Aditya Prabhakara, Saurabh Gupta, Abitha Ravishankar Front row: (Identity withheld), Ravi Gupta, Nagesh Rao, Nilesh Patil, Prasanna G. Bhat

Some moments from the event:

I notice that there are many students and developers out there who have not properly understood how inheritance is to be applied in programs. They sometimes create a mess because of improper designing of class relationships, armed with their syntactic knowledge of inheritance! Any programmer can derive class B from class A, but only a professional will know whether to inherit or not!
continue reading "The Correct Path to Inheritance!"

The Challenge: Invention of a Web Programming Language (tentatively codenamed WPL) that can replace/unify HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, SQL and CGI scripts!

continue reading "Call for Participation in CyberPlus Private Hackathon #1"

There are quite a couple of occasions where my students have asked me the difference between programming and scripting (or programs and scripts). I thought the time has finally come for me to write an article on it and close the case!

continue reading "Programming vs Scripting"

In DOS, if you write C/C++ programs using Turbo C/C++, you will need to select a memory model for the application. The memory model basically specifies the number of segments in memory for code, data and stack and has an effect on all pointers used in the program.

continue reading "Memory Models and Types of Pointers"

Every running program (process) occupies some memory for its code and data. Linux follows a particular methodology for assigning memory addresses to various parts of a program. Linux assigns a “segment” to each of the following, where a segment can be defined as a single memory block of variable size:
continue reading "Memory Layout for C Programs in Linux"

Question:

Hi! I am designing a game in C. The objective of the game is to arrange numbers in order

____7________8________4
____1________6________3
____2________5________0

by swapping them with 0

For any possible combination of these numbers…(i.e., arranging them in different possible combinations)..can we get answer…..(i.e., arrange them in order).
is it possible…..?

continue reading "Challenge: Number Puzzle Game in C"

C learners are generally pretty comfortable with the str… series of functions:

1. strlen()
2. strcpy()
3. strcat()
4. strcmp()
5. strlwr()
6. strupr()

However, I generally find a very poor awareness of the mem… series of functions:

1. memcpy()
2. memmove()
3. memset()
4. memchr()

continue reading "Article: The mem… Functions!"