Count error. Basic starting program.

[Vertico]

Schools in and I could use some help. I have never touched C before so forgive me if I have done something stupidly wrong.

Basically its a math error that I cant seem to figure out. I know something is wrong with the count variable. It jumps up to 50 for some reason I am unaware of. Can someone help me out here, I am pretty new to C so I assume I just declared something wrong perhaps? Or perhaps its just the compiler? I am useing VS2005



/*Displays a-z on the left hand side, and a running average of the letters to the right. When the left
hand letter reaches B it will display the average as a number instead of a letter.*/
#include<stdio.h>
#include<conio.h>

int main (void)
{
char letter = 'a';
char average = 'a';
char count = '2';

while(letter<='z')
{

if(letter=='b')
{
printf("%c %d\n",letter++, average);
}
else
{
printf("%c %c\n",letter++, average);
}

//Calculates the running average by adding the last average and current letter, then dividing all by count
average= (average + letter)/count;
count+=1;

}//ends while

printf("Press any key to continue%a\n");
_getch();
return 0;
}


The final output should look like this:

a a
b 97
c b
d b
e c
f c
g d
etc...

instead i get:

a a
b 3
c
d
e
f
etc...

[Saad]

The problem is that using a char to represent 2.
When you assign '2' to char it stores the ascii value of '2' which is 50. Use int to represent count

[Vertico]

Ok, so that does explain the 50, but after changing count to an int, I still get absurd numbers in the count variable.

[Tony]

does your new line of code look _exactly_ like

code:

int count = 2;

[Saad]

You should learn the basic data types C uses.

int - Used to represent an intger number
eg int count = 5;

float - Used to represent floating point numbers
eg float foo = 1.2f;

double - Used to represent big floating point number double PI = 3.14159265

char - Used to represent a character
eg char letter = 'a';


The problem you have is you're using char to store the average, you should be using float.

[md]

You're also doing your calculations after your output; if you move it so you update the average and count before you output anything it may work closer to how you want it to.

[Vertico]

I got the code working, thank you for your assistance. After that first error with the char, everything was fine except the VB2005 I was using on my laptop had some screws loose. Gave me some crazy outputs like I mentioned above, but the same compiler on the computer in class worked perfectly.