[OCLUG-devel] ArrayMaxValue() - how could I improve it?

[James Colannino]

Tim Thelin wrote:
> James Colannino wrote:
> 
>> I know that one limitation I'd like to do away with is the fact that 
>> instead of just parsing through the array until the user's input is 
>> finished, it's going to go all the way up to element 20, even if the 
>> user only enters two or three numbers.
> 
> 
> There are two ways to deal with this, either have a value in the array 
> which means "i'm an endpoint so don't go past me" or you store the 
> number of valid entries somewhere.
>[...]
> An example of the second case would be having a data structure that 
> contained your array and had a size field.... so something like
> struct mydata
> {
>    int array[ 20 ];
>    int numValidEntries;
> }

That looks interesting.  I haven't covered structures yet so I'm not 
quite sure how that works, but I'm sure I'll understand it better once I 
get to that chapter :)

> Also, make use of the C++ "//" style comments as (at least for me) its 
> less visual clutter than "/* ... */" everywhere.

I know that all modern compilers will accept the C++ style comments in C 
code, but would an older compiler accept it as well?  I doubt that 
anything I'd ever be doing would involve an old compiler, but still, I'd 
like to know that my code is portable.  I actually do prefer '//' to 
'/*... */'.

> Btw a "for" loop would probably be better than the "while" (did the book 
> cover "for" loops yet?)

Yup, I've been introduced to for loops.  I actually just didn't think 
about the fact that I could implement it here :-P  Probably would be best...

> Btw, potential issues in the code that can cause bugs:
> * I don't see "position" incremented anywhere in your function... so is 
> it really looping through the array correctly?

Yup, you're right.  I forgot to place my position++; statement in there. 
  I haven't debugged the function yet, so that'll save me some 
embarrasing frustration later ;)

> * MaxValue starts at 0, so if your array was all negative numbers ( i.e. 
> { -1, -100, -60 } ), it would return 0 instead of the largest negative 
> (i.e. -1)

True.  Perhaps I could initialize the variable by instead assigning the 
first value of the array to MaxValue (MaxValue = array[0];) and then let 
it go on from there to find the largest number.

James
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