Ok. So I'm trying to do things with C, and/or C++ (depending on my
mood at the time) and have a few books to help me along. The
titles are unimportant at this
point in time.
I get started, and get going, and
all is well, until it occurs to me: I'm on
Chapter 11 out of 25 (give or take) and
What am I doing? I'm still making
calculators! i realize that at heart a computer only deals with numbers (and very, very simple ones at that) and that facilitates the easy development of calculators, but do we really need another calculator? When you built your
bawx (you DID build it, didn't you?) did you plan to spend two thousand dollars for a calculator that covers your desk? Of course not. You have
better things to do with your time, and so does everybody else.
Mathematics are an important
concept, especially in programming. But instead of taking two variables from
stdin with
scanf(), why not do something
useful?
Strings are infinitely more
sophisticated than simple
integers, so why spend so little time studying them? The people who actually USE your
application are not going to see a lot of numbers (unless you
aim low and make a calculator like the book
recommends). I suppose calculators are good for people who like to
choose one of three dozen installed calculators, but that's not most of us.
Great! Now I can make a command-line driven calculator written in
ANSI C. That'll be a big hit, and change the way the world
spins. Hey, if you don't have some kind of development environment,
Get one! And join the increasing army of calculator-coders for yourself! Go interesting places, see interesting
people, and get a
merit badge for
mathematical excellence for yourself!