= 2026-08-26 Wednesday =

After my success at getting the 1993 gopher client "BBGOPHER" to
compile and run on my Devuan Linux netbook I thought perhaps I'd
revisit last year's attempt at learning C.

Not only learning C, but really I was learning the rudiments of
coding in general. I'm not a natural at writing software, and I'm
coming to it quite late in life (currently I'm 60 years old). But
my geeky tendencies /must/ count for something and give me a small
foothold on the ladder towards writing small programs for myself,
from scratch.

At the end of last year's C adventure I wrote what to me is a
mammoth program. 

It's contained in multiple source files, uses pointers and structs
and malloc(). It even has a Makefile - to compile it via "make" from
the several source and header files.

I wanted to see how to manage something that was modular - even if
it would probably work perfectly well in one big single file, and
without needing a Makefile.

It's text-mode RPN calculator with an 8-level complex-number stack,
Last x, 8 user memory registers.

Apart from the usual 4-functions (add, subtract, multiply & divide)
it does:

complex conjugate
complex inverse 
unit vector 
dot product 
cross product 
Rect -> Polar conversion 
Polar -> Rect conversion
(calculations can be done between mixed Polar & Rect represented
complex numbers).

Plus the usual RPN features:

Store & Recall registers
Roll stack down
Swap x<>y stack levels.
Recall Last-x register to stack.


It's probably needlessly complicated for what it does, but I wanted
to learn about structs and pointers and memory management.

It's available from the "computer/coding" section of this
gopherhole.[0]

Now I'm going to get back to learning C again. 

I'll have to go back several steps from where I got to last year
and have a refresher crash course. And then I want to get to grips
with programming a simple gopher client from scratch. In C. It'll
be a slow journey.

                   

[0]: gopher://g4slv.cloud/5/computer/coding/z_rpn.tar