What's New -  May, 2015

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May 11, 2015:  A viewer discovered a memory leak in our Big Integers unit which carried over to the Big Float unit.  UBigIntsV4 allows mathematical operations on integers whose size is only limited by available memory and UBigFloatV4 extends the extended precision feature to floating point numbers using UBigIntsForFloatV4 for the integer parts.   The Free method in both of the big integers unit released the memory specifically allocated by the program but neglected to call the inherited Free method which releases the memory taken by the system when the integer object was created.    Today's' postings include a revised library zip file, DFFLibV4_11May2015 containing the revised units.  Two test programs, BigIntsTest and BigFloatTest were modified to report allocated memory after each operation to verify the correction and to help indentify future memory release problems.

May 31, 2015:  Just time to squeeze in one more little program this month.  Outdoor activities have taken up most of my time recently and most of the daily Mensa Calendar puzzles are either solvable by programs I've already written or are not amenable to being solved by computer.  But yesterday's offering  was a good candidate so here it is:

 A surprising number of U.S. state names contain multiple pairs of letters which form standard two-letter state abbreviations. For example ALABAMA contains two: AL and MA (Alabama and Massachusetts).  If we don't allow overlapping abbreviations, there is only one state name that contains as many as  four abbreviations.  Can you find it?

 Search State Abbreviations is a  50 line program which finds the answer by listing and counting the embedded abbreviations for all 50 states.  The preceding link is to a page of twenty or so Beginner's level programs.  Just click the bookmark or scroll to the bottom of that page to download the source or executable for the new  program.