Memoirs of a Novelty Account

Some suggestions

 

master[MAXSIZE], working[WORKSIZE]; // declare as global or use malloc so they use the heap rather than the stack

 

Replace for (i = 0; (a = fgetc(fp)) != EOF; i++) master = a; with fread

Or, make the code line based & use fgets rather than trying to load the entire file into memory at once.

 

All of those hexcode comparisons are ugly. Better to use the actual characters so you don't make errors remembering ASCII codes. You should probably also look at the ctype.h functions.

 

Looks like you're doing a tokenizer. Wouldn't hurt to see if you could use strtok rather than brute forcing it yourself. (Although strtok isn't the easiest function to understand & use.)

 

I'd also use pointers rather than array indexes - more efficient code.

 

That all being said - sometimes being told you can't do something is enough to motivate you to prove them wrong. And there's nothing wrong with brute force code to get you over the initial challenges. But learn the libraries and leverage those functions - you don't have to re-invent the wheel (why write your own quick sort routine when qsort exists), there's less risk of introducing your own bugs and they are typically faster because the library can be in native code.

Thanks for the pointers! *(no pun intended.)

 

Yeah I thought about making the master array dynamic. Something about setting a max size just bothers me.

I refrained from using strtok because I didn't initially design the program to use <string.h> even though I ended up using it anyway. Plus, I was required to do it on a character-by-character basis. I'm not familiar with fread yet.

 

I'll keep this in mind when I rebuild this for my own programming language.