Re: [Swarm-Support] Questions about simpleBatchBug3

[Paul E. Johnson]

I'm delighted you found that new tutorial module.  I've not heard any 
feedback about it.

Clements wrote:

> First:
>
> I'm converting createTimeString from the tutorial's simpleBatchBug3
> Output.m file to a usableform for a project I am working on and came to
> wonder why timeString is 100 chars long? According to the man page for
> ctime it returns a 26 character set, while a %4d sprintf shouldn't go over
> that boundary either (I can represent a pretty big number with 25 base-10
> characters).  A much smaller number or even a variable array could be used
> without incident?
Yes, I think so.

> Is it just set that large for safety reasons, formatting reasons, or is
> there something fundamental I'm missing???
>  
It was set there at random by me because I wanted to be absolutely sure 
I had a big enough array to hold what got returned on any system.
I'm just doing things that work, and I hope you guys who actually know 
about computers will clean up after me. :)

> Secondary question:
>
> Do we have to worry about a character being ':' or ' ' or '\n' in the
> snprintf of the run number?
>  
I think neither of those should be in the run file name, if that is what 
you mean.

> Tertiary question:
>
> The code in createTimeString iterates through all 100 items in the array.
> Is there a reason to continue after setting a \n to a \0 in the string?
>  
I don't know!  I see your point that the \0 should be seen as a string 
terminator, but I don't know why you wouldn't just go ahead and clean up 
the whole thing anyway.  Unless you are doing this thing a million times 
or something, it seems to me there is no reason to worry about it.  But, 
as you can see from my code and from my confession above, String 
manipulation is the most annoying part of C for me and I'll gladly 
accept any proposed changes you want to make in simpleBatchBug3 after 
you get your new thingie worked out.

> Thanks for any help on clarifying these.
>
> Sincerely,
> David
>
>
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--
Paul E. Johnson                       email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
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