RE: DOS: A newbie question about get()
- Posted by "Alex Caracatsanis" <sunpsych at ncable.com.au> Dec 31, 2003
- 428 views
Hi Brian, and others: -----Original Message----- From: Brian Broker [mailto:bkb at cnw.com] What do you want to accomplish? Fair point, Brian! I realize now that I was trying to understand what get() does, how it works, and where it stands in comparison with the other routines available for reading input. So I set myself an artificial problem: if my program had to read input that may be either a number or a string, but that must not be a no_input or invalid_input, how would I implement it using get(); and would get() be the best way of implementing it in any case? (Maybe the problem would've been more convincing if I'd set out to read data from a file.) I realized that prompt_string() and prompt_number() will read their respective data types, and that gets() won't read numbers; and I understood that getc() will read the next character (altho' come to think of it, I don't really understand in what context this might be a useful thing to do). It seemed that get() was the ideal tool to read either data type, and do a bit of error-checking at the same time. I tried to write some code to put it thro' its paces, so to speak. Maybe I should've asked: when's it best to use get()? ...or: in what programming tasks would get() be ideal? ...or even: if get() didn't exist, would it be missed? Thank you for your advice Alex Caracatsanis