Please do not share your answers with others - unless it is to ask them questions that guide them to the answers - this is not a memorization excercise. This is an excercise in refining understanding.

This program is missing a line - it counts the number of times it sees a lowercase alphabet letter including 'a' and all the way through 'z'.

Questions:

What does record_init do? Why is eat_extra_input necissary? How could read_char be implemented differently? -- How would that change eat_extra_input?

When you enter a number at the prompt the program says and assertion is violated - What is this assertion? Why is the assertion violated?

What are assertions good for?

What line of code is missing from the program?

What are all of limitations of this program?

How could this program be extended to support numbers?

How could this program be extended to support chinese characters?

How could this program be extended to support the entire UNICODE character set?

Extra ;

What is a Makefile

Why does 'make' without any arguments compile the code.

Why does running 'make' once and then 'make' a second time say 'nothing to be done for `all`'?

Tips :

requires 'GNUMake' and 'GCC' and optionally 'GDB'.

compile code:

make clean && make

run code in debugger:

$ gdb first (gdb) run