/* Learning-to-code Student projects for cs50 and assorted experimentation

const string academic_honesty = "Harvard says that sharing solutions to the problems, or making them available, violates their academic honesty policy. So while I'd like to share my work, I did choose to take advantage of the course being offered for free (as in beer). So this will just be a record of some of the challenges faced, mistakes made, and successes achieved along the way.\n";

int main(void) { CS50_week_0(scratch) { First project is to make a game in Scratch; I'm making a little basketball shooting game :)

      I also uploaded my week 0 #cs50 game to the Scratch website, so you can now revel in the awkward graphics, 
      janky lunar-gravity physics, and "sweet" tunes from the comfort of your desktop/laptop browser.

      Aiming digital basketballs at a net is not gonna change your life, 
      but I had a blast hacking together solutions to the coding puzzles I created for myself. 

      (My high score is 19, btw)
 
      https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/774428366/
 }
 
 
 Cs50_week_1(second week, translating the Scratch concepts to C)
 {
      Malan is a fantastic teacher, introducing concepts, syntax, and terminology at a pace that rewards concentration, 
      but rarely feels rushed. Wish I'd done this years ago!

      Watched the first half, banged out a 'Mario-more' solution, then watched the second half, defined some functions, 
      and rewrote it. Still a bit fuzzy on the syntax for defining/calling functions. Practice, I guess.

      Tonight: the cash/credit problems. Fun!
 
      ...
 
      Whew ok

      Cash was pretty straightforward (most of the code was given).

      Credit taught me some Fun Lessons

      - int vs long and how the computer is likely handling them within functions
      - you can't define a function inside another function
      - grasping how to define vs call vs point to functions is a bit head-spinning at first
      - using printf to debug is really handy
      - don't assume you did your math right, unless you want to stare at the screen forever, good times ;)
 }     
      
 Cs50_week_2(scrabble & readability, in c)
 {
      Part_1(Scrabble.c)
      {
           Okay, function calls make sense now

           Had a mental block wrt how a function's inputs/returns are named in main
           (where they're named based on the specific intention for that function call) vs how they appear in the actual function 
           definition (where the names are more about the function's generalized operation). 

           *Now* it all seems obvious...

           Anyway, also forgot the single quotes + backslash of '\0' in scrabble.c for a while, good times!
      }
 
      Part_2(Readability.c)
      {
           Banged out most of it fairly quickly until the last f(x) where the letter, word, and sentence counts go into an equation:
 
           1: Neglected to initialize an int that only appeared in the 'else' brackets of an if-else, 
           but still tried to return that int value, oops;

           2: Learned something about when type-casting is necessary in order to get a float output, 
           i.e. if x and y are ints, then 
           {
                float z = (x/y) * 100.0 
           }
           doesn't work.

 
           Live && learn!
      }
      
 Cs50_week_2(Caesar & substitution, in c)
 {
      Did both options because why not.

      Enjoying using functions now, and even though it's super early days on this journey, trying to keep an eye toward 
      writing efficient, reusable, versatile code.

      For Caesar (easier problem) 
      {
           I was a bit disappointed in the way they want you to do it; rather than building an encoded string in memory,
           it's just printf-ed a letter at a time instead.

           Butted up against data type errors for quite a while to try to do the former. Eventually relented - 
           sometimes it's actually true that you need to learn to walk before you can run!
      }
      
      For Substitution (harder problem)
      {
           this was a fun puzzle for a beginner like me - nested loops w/ functions, & the need to understand the
           naming/syntax/etc for arrays vs strings vs chars.

           Got tripped up on a loop -

           int counter = 0;
           for (int i = 0; i != '\0'; counter++)
           {}

           where I confused the 'first element is zero' rule for 'first counter++ is zero'. Rookie mistake!
           
           And also had a good self-teaching moment where I realized where the logic (of my method to check the
           validity of a user input) wasn't actually covering all the possible wrong inputs.

           In this particular case I can't imagine how it would be a security vulnerability per se. But it made it
           clear just how easy it is to unintentionally create an exploitable bug that could go completely unnoticed
           by users for quite some time.
      }
      
 Cs50_Week_3(Algorithms)
 {
      lecture_notes(recursion)
      {
           Geez, trying to understand recursive functions is like trying to understand recursive functions,
           you know what I mean?
      
           ...
      
           Ohhhhh lol ok I had a mental block around why the "return;" didn't back the 'draw' function out of itself 
           completely. Suddenly occurred to me that it's only returning out of that (n = 0) function call, thus
           allowing the rest to complete, since they're already at the line *after* draw(n - 1)

           For whatever reason, I wasn't picturing the calls as existing inside one another. I guess this is why 
           Malan recommends using the debugger to step into the code in order to see what it's doing.
      }

      plurality.c
      {
           Oh lordy

           plurality.c compiles - but does not run how I intended.

           Merge sort is a bit harder to implement that I imagined lol

           I know it would have been easier to do either selection or bubble sort but I wanted the challenge 🤪
      }

      plurality.c cont
      {
           alright got plurality.c sorted out, no pun intended

           Just had to walk through the logic of the steps of the recursive merge sort function, use printf as a debugging tool in a few places, and found my error. Hadn't added 1 to the rounded-up 'halfway' integer to get the first place value of the right-hand side of the sorting function - a sentence which probably makes immediate sense only to me 😃

           Curious to look up other implementations, mine feels a little messy. #cs50
      }

      tideman.c
      {
           So, after writing 4 versions(!) of a selection sort algorithm that uses recursion, thought I'd made a fairly elegant one (def have a better handle on how to think through the task).

           Displaying some of the function's work w/ printf seems to show it doing what it should... But check50 is still telling me that it's not sorting the pairs properly?!

           Kinda flummoxed. Will finish up the remaining functions, get it to the 'print_winner' stage, and see if anything changes. 
      }

      tideman.c cont
      {
           Gonna accept the 17/18 grade here ha

           Still think my logic for the sort algo was good

           Things tried as fixes:
           -Remove ".margin" field I'd added to the pair struct, and make a separate array to store those values: didn't help.

           -Make a function to do the copying for each struct field manually, rather than try to copy all fields via pair[y] = pair[x]: same.

           Anyway. Rewrote the recursive algo that checks for loops and got it down to a nifty 19 line function.

           Progress 😊
      }
 }

 Cs50_Week_4(Memory)
 {
      recover.c
      {
           Lol.

           Was getting segmentation faults and could not figure out why for ages.

           Turned out to be the boolean expression

           while (fread(...) == BLOCK_SIZE)

           which I'd taken directly from the hints section of the problem walkthrough.

           Still not fluent enough to know if it was the way I defined BLOCK_SIZE that made this fail, or if it was the card.raw file, or who knows what.

           Regardless, as soon as I changed it to

           while (fread(...) != 0)

           I got real output 😊
      }

      reverse.c
      {
           
      }
 }          

*/