Tag Archives: Interview Q-A

A locale is a description of certain conventions your program might be expected to follow under certain circumstances. It’s mostly helpful to internationalize your program. If you were going to print an amount of money, would you always use a dollar sign? Not if your program was going to run in the United Kingdom; there, you’d use a pound sign. In some countries, the currency symbol goes before the number; in some, it goes after. Where does the sign go for a negative number? How about the decimal point? A number that would be printed 1,234.56 in the United States … Click here to continue….. →

The header file ctype.h defines various functions for determining what class a character belongs to. These consist of the following functions: Function Character Class Returns Nonzero for Characters isdigit() – Decimal digits – 0-9 isxdigit() – Hexadecimal digits – 0-9, a-f, or A-F isalnum() – Alphanumerics – 0-9, a-z, or A-Z isalpha() – Alphabetics – a-z or A-Z islower() – Lowercase alphabetics – a-z isupper() – Uppercase alphabetics – A-Z isspace() – Whitespace – Space, tab, vertical tab, newline, form feed, or carriage return isgraph() – Nonblank characters – Any character that appears nonblank when printed (ASCII 0x21 through 0x7E) … Click here to continue….. →

Not all C programmers write database management systems and word processors. Some write code for embedded systems, such as anti-lock braking systems and intelligent toasters. Embedded systems don’t necessarily have any sort of file system, or much of an operating system at all. The ANSI/ISO standard calls these “free-standing” systems, and it doesn’t require them to provide anything except the language itself. The alternative is a program running on a PC or a mainframe or something in-between; that’s a “hosted” environment. Even people developing for free-standing environments should pay attention to the standard library. For one thing, if a free-standing … Click here to continue….. →

The funny thing is, these are not necessarily the files that define what you’re looking for. Your compiler guarantees that (for example) if you want the EDOM macro, you can get it by including <errno.h>. EDOM might be defined in <errno.h>, or <errno.h> might just include something that defines it. Worse, the next version of your compiler might define EDOM somewhere else. Don’t look in the files for the definition and use that file. Use the file that’s supposed to define the symbol you want. It’ll work. A few names are defined in multiple files: NULL, size_t, and wchar_t. If … Click here to continue….. →