Git's list of banned C functions

Post by hutzlibu » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 12:19 AM UTC

young_unixer wrote: post #279

paganel wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This heavily filters for people who have had experience with programming in high-school or even before that, there's no way for a programming novice to pass that grueling routine. And then people rhetorically ask themselves why students coming from economically disadvantaged households are under-represented in this industry (one of the best paying industries in this time and age). Stuff like that has got to change.

I don't really get the correlation between household income and programming experience in high school. Their parents can't afford a laptop? They can't afford an Internet connection? The kids don't have a good place to learn in their house? They don't have time? Is programming affected more than other subjects like math, English/grammar, science, etc?

Post by __turbobrew__ » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 12:21 AM UTC

paganel wrote: post #267

orwin wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my school, we had two days to understand the basics of text editors, git (add, commit, rebase, reset, push) and basic bash functions (ls, cd, cp, mv, diff and patch, find, grep...) + pipes, then a day to understand how while, if/else and function calls work, then a day to understand how pointer work, then a day to understand how malloc(), free() and string works (we had to remake strlen, strcpy, and protect them).…

This heavily filters for people who have had experience with programming in high-school or even before that, there's no way for a programming novice to pass that grueling routine. And then people rhetorically ask themselves why students coming from economically disadvantaged households are under-represented in this industry (one of the best paying industries in this time and age). Stuff like that has got to change.

Post by kiwidrew » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 12:21 AM UTC

david2ndaccount wrote: post #327

kiwidrew wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that C's fundamental mistake (well, more like limitation due to hardware of the time) was allowing arrays to decay to pointers; arrays hold valuable type information (the length!) that is lost once converted to a pointer. C99 came so very very close with VLAs. You can declare a function like: int main(int argc, char *argv[argc]) { ... } But C99 requires the compiler to discard the type annotations and t…

What you want works, you just used the wrong syntax: #include void foo(int len, const char (*str)[len]){ printf("%zu\n", sizeof(*str)); printf("%.*s", len, *str); } int main(void){ // note: not nul-terminated const char text[] = {'h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', ' ', 'w', 'o', 'r', 'l', 'd', '!', '\n'}; // prints 13, then 'hello world!' foo(sizeof(text), &text); return 0; }

  /* original function */
  void foo(size_t len, const char *str);
  /* compatible signature but str[] decays to sizeless pointer */
  void foo(size_t len, const char str[len]);
  /* allowed but signature is no longer compatible with original */
  void foo_improved(size_t len, const char (*str)[len]);
  /* (this is how the non-VLA caller would see the signature) */
  void foo_improved(size_t len, const char **str);

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 12:25 AM UTC

young_unixer wrote: post #279

paganel wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This heavily filters for people who have had experience with programming in high-school or even before that, there's no way for a programming novice to pass that grueling routine. And then people rhetorically ask themselves why students coming from economically disadvantaged households are under-represented in this industry (one of the best paying industries in this time and age). Stuff like that has got to change.

I don't really get the correlation between household income and programming experience in high school. Their parents can't afford a laptop? They can't afford an Internet connection? The kids don't have a good place to learn in their house? They don't have time? Is programming affected more than other subjects like math, English/grammar, science, etc?

Post by int_19h » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 12:27 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #220

retrac wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For reasons that were never clearly articulated, the prefix approach was considered odd, backwards, and to have numerous downsides, at least where I learned C. In hindsight, I can only cringe at that attitude. Strings as added in later Pascal, about 40 years ago now, were memory safe in a way that C strings still are not.

Pascal strings are not inherently memory safe: cat_pascal_strings(pascalstr *uninited_memory, pascalstr *left, pascalstr *right); how big is uninited_memory? Can left and right fit into it? You need to design language constructs around Pascal srings to make them actually safe. Such as, oh, make it impossible to have an uninitialized such object. The object has o know both its allocation size and the actual size of th…