So as someone who has an unhealthy love of C I have to say this is amazing and will be forwarding it on to some friends trying to learn C. The humor is just fantastic IMHO.
C for high level programmers (slides)
11–20 of 129 posts
Re: C for high level programmers (slides)
#12So as someone who has an unhealthy love of C I have to say this is amazing and will be forwarding it on to some friends trying to learn C. The humor is just fantastic IMHO.
Ehh, you can never have too much C! ;)
Re: C for high level programmers (slides)
#13No mention of undefined behavior? That's the first thing I tell people about C, considering how easy it is to trigger.
Re: C for high level programmers (slides)
#14No mention of undefined behavior? That's the first thing I tell people about C, considering how easy it is to trigger.
The issue with undefined behavior is it's kind of hard to... well... define. It's an odd combination of unsafe memory, float/integer rollover, and rules with memory allocation. I wasn't quite sure how to clearly state it.
Re: C for high level programmers (slides)
#15No mention of undefined behavior? That's the first thing I tell people about C, considering how easy it is to trigger.
There was a mention of garbage being returned from an out of bounds array.
Re: C for high level programmers (slides)
#16The thing about pointers that I don't get is why do you need the memory address of the variable? Is that the only way to get the value when you want it? Like, every variable has to have a pointer in order to make use of the variable?
Re: C for high level programmers (slides)
#17teaching C and not checking malloc, bad idea. using realloc in the way its used in this "tutorial" can cause memory leaks. realloc should be checked before reassigned because it can return NULL and that will overwrite the previous valid memory address.
Re: C for high level programmers (slides)
#18No mention of undefined behavior? That's the first thing I tell people about C, considering how easy it is to trigger.
The issue with undefined behavior is it's kind of hard to... well... define. It's an odd combination of unsafe memory, float/integer rollover, and rules with memory allocation. I wasn't quite sure how to clearly state it.
Yeah I tend not to get hung up on the different ways it can trigger. It's more like, if you trigger it your program might run fine for now and then suddenly act up one day. It might die before the undefined behavior. It might launch nukes. Still sure you want to get into this? No? Want to go back to Ruby? Well, Ruby is built atop C. That's the five states of grief I try to get them through.
Re: C for high level programmers (slides)
#19 C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success. While accidents of history surely
helped, it evidently satisfied a need for a system implementation language
efficient enough to displace assembly language, yet sufficiently abstract and
fluent to describe algorithms and interactions in a wide variety of environments.
-- Dennis M. Ritchie (in "The Development of the C Language" [1])
Re: C for high level programmers (slides)
#20[deleted]