C Program to Plot the Gamma Function in the Terminal

In this post I want to talk about a C program I wrote just recently that plots a mathematical function - specifically the gamma function. I think it's worth looking at, because this program demonstrates how to handle the various aspects of graphing and plotting using just ASCII characters in the terminal. The program draws …

C Program to Generate a Blank MS-DOS Floppy Image in Linux

How do you do, fellow old-timers? Today's post is going to be a bit of a crossover, because I'm going to get into some programming stuff, some Linux stuff, and some DOS stuff all at the same time. I'm going to show you a program that I wrote a while back that uses POSIX API …

Exploring Borland Turbo Pascal for DOS

I've been having some more adventures in VirtualBox, messing around with DOS software. This time I thought I'd explore Borland Turbo Pascal. I have an affinity for ancient programming languages - Pascal, Fortran, BASIC, Lisp, etc. I like them for basically the same reason I like vintage computers and old operating systems. It's like exploring …

Obfuscated Unix Scripting with dc

So I realized that I liked the concept behind Obfuscated Unix Scripting with sed and I thought I'd make a series. There are a number of scripting languages native to Unix, and many of them qualify as being what you would call "obfuscated". One such language is the classic Unix calculator known as dc. This …

Doing Statistics in awk

One exercise that offers a lot of interesting challenges in coding is to use a programming language for an application that it's not intended to be used for. Writing a Fortran compiler in TECO and solving the Towers of Hanoi problem in the troff text formatter are two examples from the legendary Hacker Purity Test. …

Analyzing Twitter Analytics Data in R

I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to become popular on Twitter. It's pretty much impossible if you're not already a celebrity or public figure, but I figured I'd try to maximize my success anyway. I did some data analysis using CSV data that I exported from the Twitter Analytics page. …

Adding Set Types to the C Programming Language

Well, it's been over a month since my last post, so it's high time I got back into it. I kinda got distracted by other stuff on other sites, most notably DeviantArt and Discord. But I'm back now, and hopefully I'll be able to post more consistently in the future. This is my third article …

Data Science in C: Combining CSV with SQL

In the last episode of Data Science in C I talked about the parser portion of my CSV library, which I implemented using automata. Now that we've parsed the CSV code and converted it into an abstract table structure, it's time to implement some operations on the table data so that we can actually use …

libdfloat: A C Library for Exact Representation of Decimal Floating Point Numbers

Guys, something really awesome just happened!... I actually finished one of my large-scale coding projects! I'd like to introduce you to libdfloat, a C library for representing decimal numbers without any rounding errors. I started this project as an offshoot of my CSV library when I realized that there was a need for a mechanism …

Data Science in C: Programming a Turing Machine to Parse CSV Code

Okay, so maybe I ripped my featured image from the Hack-A-Day site, but that image of a personification of a Turing machine as an intelligent robot was too relevant to the topic of this post to pass up, so sue me. 😛 I want to talk about the first step to building data science or …