I don't want to be toxic but why make a function to cast a char to an int? I was astounded when I briefly skimmed through the list. I hope this is not curriculum in education.
It's not. The whole thing is a joke.
Infrequently Asked Questions in Comp.lang.c (1999)
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Re: Infrequently Asked Questions in Comp.lang.c (1999)
#32Re: Infrequently Asked Questions in Comp.lang.c (1999)
#33These don't look like "stupid questions" at all, but the disdainful smart aleck responders do look stupid. What a sad, toxic group of people.
Why is it toxic?
Re: Infrequently Asked Questions in Comp.lang.c (1999)
#34Some great in-jokes there (hands up who gets the EBCDIC one).
More seriously, a lot of the discussions about "undefined behaviour" seem to be aimed at the kind of code that no experienced engineer would write anyway. Until there's a language that's proved formally correct, every language is going to have "undefined" behaviour (though some languages - especially more modern ones - cover more cases/make it harder for less experienced users to blow their foot [or worse, someone elses] off).
Re: Infrequently Asked Questions in Comp.lang.c (1999)
#35After reading through this, I'm not sure if it's a list of jokes or real information? For example: > long ints can be entered using hexadecimal notation; for instance, > long int foo = 07; How is this a good example of hexadecimal input?
Try compiling:-
main() { int foo = 08; }
Re: Infrequently Asked Questions in Comp.lang.c (1999)
#36Obligatory reference to http://vanilla-js.com
Re: Infrequently Asked Questions in Comp.lang.c (1999)
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of them are inside jokes that aren't very funny. Most of them are indeed frequently asked, but by people who are a bit obstinate or otherwise don't fit the mold that old timers thought newbies should fit. As a result, the responses are often intentionally dismissive and unhelpful. EDIT: It occurs to me that comp.lang.c was the 80s-90s version of Stack Overflow. So at least they're comparatively funnier than the…
It was better than StackOverflow in a lot of ways. Sure, it wasn't useful as a searchable database of questions, but the FAQ was very useful if you could spend time to wade through it, and any zero-effort posters were either flamed to oblivion or simply ignored. I remember asking a couple stupid questions and directed to the documentation. To this day, at work I will suggest "let's see what the manual says", while tr…
What kind of pushback?
Re: Infrequently Asked Questions in Comp.lang.c (1999)
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was better than StackOverflow in a lot of ways. Sure, it wasn't useful as a searchable database of questions, but the FAQ was very useful if you could spend time to wade through it, and any zero-effort posters were either flamed to oblivion or simply ignored. I remember asking a couple stupid questions and directed to the documentation. To this day, at work I will suggest "let's see what the manual says", while tr…
What kind of pushback?
“The documentation can’t possibly be up-to-date”, probably.
Re: Infrequently Asked Questions in Comp.lang.c (1999)
#39Re: Infrequently Asked Questions in Comp.lang.c (1999)
#40After reading through this, I'm not sure if it's a list of jokes or real information? For example: > long ints can be entered using hexadecimal notation; for instance, > long int foo = 07; How is this a good example of hexadecimal input?
Just as a broken clock shows the correct time twice a day, you can use this syntax to input hexadecimal numbers less than 0A.
Less than 8 actually. 0 at the start of a number indicates it’s octal, so 08 and 09 are not syntactically valid numbers.