Question

My professor gave us some code in a Microsoft Word document and said it should be able to compile, but I’m getting all sorts of errors and I don’t know whats wrong because I have no experience whatsoever with C.

It’s an assembly language class and we’re supposed to write assembly code to match what the C code is doing. He told us to run the program in C to get a feel of things.

#include <stdio.h>
#define  SIZE  40

main()
{
    int v[SIZE];
    register int gap, i, j, temp;

    /*  Initialize array to random positive integers mod 256  */
    for (i = 0; i < SIZE; i++)
        v[i] = rand() & 0xFF;

    /*  Display the unsorted array  */
    for (i = 0; i < SIZE; i++)
        printf(“v[%-d] = %-d\n”, i, v[i]);

    /*  Sort the array using a shell sort  */
    for (gap = SIZE / 2; gap > 0; gap /= 2) {
        for (i = gap; i < SIZE; i++) {
            for (j = i - gap; j >= 0 && v[j] > v[j + gap]; j -= gap) {
                /*  Exchange out of order items  */
                temp = v[j];
                v[j] = v[j + gap];
                v[j + gap] = temp;
            }
        }
    }

    /*  Display the sorted array  */
    for (i = 0; i < SIZE; i++)
        printf(“v[%-d] = %-d\n”, i, v[i]);
    }

The errors I get are strays in lines 15 and 31, so each line that has a printf in it.

As3.c: In function ’main’:
As3.c:15: error: stray ’\223’ in program
As3.c:15: error: expected expression before ’%’ token
As3.c:15: error: expected expression before ’%’ token
As3.c:15: error: stray ’\’ in program
As3.c:15: error: stray ’\224’ in program
As3.c:31:error: stray ’\223’ in program
As3.c:31:error: expected expression before ’%’ token
As3.c:31:error: expected expression before ’%’ token
As3.c:31:error: stray ’\’ in program
As3.c:31:error: stray ’\224’ in program

How can I fix this problem?

Answer 1

It looks like some of the characters got “smart”-ified, probably by Microsoft Word or a similar program. You’ll need to do a find-and-replace to change “ and ” to " (and perhaps likewise for other characters, though “ and ” are the only characters complained about in the specific compile-errors you’ve posted).