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To become a good C programmer (2011)

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Re: To become a good C programmer (2011)

#31

Post by omginternets »

School-Cotton wrote: post #16
genop wrote: post #15

"And no good book is as good as disassembly output." [x] Strongly agree [ ] Agree [ ] Neutral [ ] Disagree [ ] Strongly disagree For me, C, i.e., GCC, is most useful as a faster way to generate assembly for a particular CPU than typing it out from scratch. I use GCC as a code generator. I'd like to see more free asm code generators, but I am not holding my breath. I do appreciate C as a medium for distributing reason…

I don't really understand what this means. How is that different from how anyone else uses a compiler?

I think he means that he works like this:

1. Write some C

2. Dump the corresponding assembly code

3. Modify the code by hand

Re: To become a good C programmer (2011)

#34

Post by eternalban »

jsnk wrote: post #19

What's a good practical but small enough project you can do with C? Typically if you are learning Ruby or Node, people recommend creating a blog. What's something like that for C?

Go and grab yourself the latest edition of the excellent Advanced Programming in Unix by Stevens [1]. C in practical action.

(Yes, I'm in the dive in the deep end learning camp.)

[1]: http://kohala.com/start/

Re: To become a good C programmer (2011)

#35

Post by tmuir »

dsfuoi wrote: post #7
scarmig wrote: post #3

K&R is often recommended, and it's certainly fun to read and accessible. But I've also heard it's outdated, and doesn't rally focus much on modern C software design, mostly because the world knew little about it when K&R was written. Thoughts?

I think the style should be avoided; code shouldn't be compact and variable names should be descriptive. Artificial example: for( int i = 0 ; i should be: for( int count = 0 ; count It may be allowed to use i in place of count here, but this is the only place where single name variables should be permitted and only if i is really just a simple array index iterator.

Even "i" can be changed to "index". My rule of thumb is this: If you wouldn't use the abbreviation when speaking, don't use it when coding.

I don't understand why 'i' has been given a pass. The argument boils down to saved keystrokes. Typing is not the bottleneck.

Re: To become a good C programmer (2011)

#36

Post by bluetomcat »

userbinator wrote: post #8
dsfuoi wrote: post #2

This is the first time I have seen sizeof used like this: sizeof( &array[0] ) This looks equal to: sizeof( array ) at first glance, which would give the size of the entire array in bytes, but of course the &array[0] expression is really: &*( array + 0 ) which simplifies to: array + 0 which is a pointer. And using sizeof on it gives the size of a pointer to int. Edit: (&* array) will also give a pointer. --- This is j…

The array->pointer "decay" (as the standard calls it) has 3 exceptions, of which two are when an array is the operand of "sizeof", and when it is the operand of "&". (The third involves a string initialiser, which is not relevant here.) So your reasoning is not quite correct, it should really be that you think of sizeof( &array[0] ) as being sizeof( &(something) ) where "something" could be of any type T, and so the…

> and when it is the operand of "&"

Another slightly confusing aspect is that `&array` gives you a "pointer to array" (which has the same value as `&array[0]`, but is of a different type). Most importantly, it behaves differently in pointer arithmetic (the implied offset is the size of the array, rather than the size of its elements).

Re: To become a good C programmer (2011)

#37

Post by joshumax »

When I first started out with C (and back at that time it was the first programmimg language I started learning) I read a majority of the "standard" books and felt rather confident in my understanding of the basics, but when it came to actually writing C, I never felt like I was writing good, pragmatic code. So I started combing through the sources of popular FOSS software like gtk, musl libc, Linux, OpenRC, gcc, etc, submitting bugfixes for a few of them, and asking for code reviews on mailing lists until I finally thought that I was doing okay. I still felt like my knowledge was lacking though, so I decided to learn the internals of the modern x86 machine by writing a hobby OS resembling MINIX (I think I even got X working at one point). Despite still not being the best programmer, it really helped with my understanding of why things are done in C like they are.

Re: To become a good C programmer (2011)

#38

Post by rayiner »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #28
optforfon wrote: post #17

The more I learn C the more I hate it. At first it seems simple and easy but reading "Expert C Programming" is reading a laundry list of what's really messed up with the language. 80% of the problems would be solved by some sane syntactic sugar that compiles down to C

My guess is that liking/not liking 'C' depends on how interested you are in its representation model. If you're actively disinterested in how things work as bits in memory, then I can't blame you a ... bit.

No the representation model is fine. It's where C tries to be something other than portable assembly where it goes awry. E.g. C has more syntax for arrays than actually exists at runtime, which leads to surprising behavior. The problem with array arguments discussed in the LKML thread posted above is a great example.

Re: To become a good C programmer (2011)

#39

Post by stevetrewick »

jsnk wrote: post #19

What's a good practical but small enough project you can do with C? Typically if you are learning Ruby or Node, people recommend creating a blog. What's something like that for C?

A virtual machine and assembler. This is actually pretty straightforward and lots of fun.

Re: To become a good C programmer (2011)

#40

Post by renox »

RodericDay wrote: post #27
ams6110 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say generally I feel that way about any language I've learned. Initially they are pretty easy and the examples given include slick solutions to contrived problems. Then you get into wanting to do real work and you learn about all the corner cases and ambiguities and landmines that are hidden farther afield. Can anyone name a language that they've grown to like more the more they learned about it? I would gues…

I'm not a super genius programmer by any means, but I've had a lot of pleasant surprises learning about the depths of Python.

I disagree: no static typing --> annoying runtime errors, no 'use strict'..
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