CS208, Monday 17 Jan 2022

Zooming

• The Zoom link for the course (office hours + in-class + day-to-day short Zoom calls) is on my office hours page

Questions about queues assignment

• q_reverse?
• anything else?
• what's the difference between "char buffer[]" and "char *"?
• strcpy vs. strncpy vs. strlcpy

What do I want you to know so far?

• C programming basics
• Pointers and linked structures in C
• Integers: binary, octal, decimal, hexadecimal representations
• Integers: two's complement representation, including addition and negation
• Byte order (little-endian and big-endian)
• Characters: standards, codepoints, and encodings (see below)

Next assignments

• Quiz on C and data representation, due Thursday 1/20
• Problem set on bitwise operations and x86 and C, due Monday 1/24
• Reverse engineering assignment, due Thursday 1/27

Characters

• Standards organizations (IEEE, ANSI, NIST, IETF, ISO, W3C, ITU,...)
• History: EBCDIC, ASCII, Unicode
• Codepoints & the U+XXXX notation
• Codepoints vs. encodings
• UCS-2 and UTF-16
• UTF-16 LE vs. UTF-16 BE
• UTF-8
• An encoding helper
• BOM (0xfeff)

Bit operations in C

• NOT, OR, AND, XOR as logical operations
• logical identities like DeMorgan's Laws
• "bitwise" logical operations
• ~, |, &, ^ in C

Next

• x86 assembly language: architecture and some simple code
• back and forth between x86 and C: what is the compiler up to?