I've been a professional C programmer for years, but I rarely find cdecl useful (command line or website). Not because complex C declarations are intuitive to me, but because cdecl fails on any unknown types. Real world C code is full of typedefs.
Cdecl – Turns English phrases into C declarations
11–20 of 56 posts
Re: Cdecl – Turns English phrases into C declarations
#12The way to make complex C declarations legible is to use typedefs for the subtypes (like function pointers).
Re: Cdecl – Turns English phrases into C declarations
#13Hey, this is my site, first published 2009! This is the venerable cdecl enhanced with blocks support.
It used to be a shared host with a PHP script shelling out to the cdecl executable, written in K&R C. Now it's that same executable running on AWS Lambda.
Yes Lambda really will run arbitrary ELF binaries.
Re: Cdecl – Turns English phrases into C declarations
#14The actual principle behind the C type declarations is "declaration follows use". Let me explain what this means. Take this declaration
int *pi;
int *pi, i;
Declaration of array types is similar. For example,
int arr[10];
Pointers to functions work the same way. For example,
int (*f)(char, double);
Re: Cdecl – Turns English phrases into C declarations
#15Its better to create a series of typedef and build up the declaration. Most of the time you need those sub typedef anyway.
Re: Cdecl – Turns English phrases into C declarations
#16Back in early 2000s, we had bots on IRC doing this. My favorite technique was to pass the type to a template function, assign it to an integer and then parse the compile time error produced by gcc to extract the type.
Re: Cdecl – Turns English phrases into C declarations
#17Its better to create a series of typedef and build up the declaration. Most of the time you need those sub typedef anyway.
Extremely sparingly, typedefs like in glib are a nightmare and just arbitrary typedefs like char -> char_t are just useless
Re: Cdecl – Turns English phrases into C declarations
#18tried: declare xxx as integer pointer to array of string equal to "mumu" and "kaka"
got: bad character '"'...apostrophe instead of double quote has the same result...well, I guess I expected too much
Re: Cdecl – Turns English phrases into C declarations
#19Here's an easy way to understand how these things work: in C, the type of a pointer/function/array mess is declared by how it's used. For a declaration like "int ( * ( * foo)(void))[3]", you can read it as "for a variable foo, after computing the expression ( * ( * foo)(void))[3], the result is an int." So one way to read C "gibberish" is to ignore the type at the beginning and parse the rest as an expression like a…
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Re: Cdecl – Turns English phrases into C declarations
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