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As a C programmer, I find this kind of bad faith article very irritating. Yes, the standard library is bad. This is by far the worst part of the C legacy. But it is not that hard to write your own. String functions like this are not difficult at all, and you can use better naming and semantics, write faster code etc. C is not the C standard library, ffs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
this wouldn't catch overflow or underflow errors, nor does it allow non-base-10 numbers, nor does it handle negative numbers. and writing your own parser is a failure case by op's logic. they are complaining about the builtin parsing functions. the author admits you can parse signed integers in their second example, but for unsigned, they don't like seem to like that unsigned parsing will accept negative numbers and…
I think "output" is just supposed to be a human-readable version of "output raw". So the line in the table where "output raw" is 2 but "output" is 1 looks like a mistake. It's repeated in the table for sscanf().
I wasn't in this class myself, but one prof at my alma mater started his "Programming 201" class with the simplest assignment: write a C program that accepts two integers from the user and prints their sum. It actually was the only assignment for the rest of the semester, since he has a test suite that would humiliate the students gently at first, but would ultimately pipe a billion nines into stdin as the first argu…
Perfect is the enemy of good.
"You have to get lucky every time. We only have to get lucky once".
Cant you just: for(int i = 0; i = 0) { ret = ret * 10 + characters[i] - 48; } else { return ERROR; } } return ret; Adjust until it actually works, but you get the picture.
this wouldn't catch overflow or underflow errors, nor does it allow non-base-10 numbers, nor does it handle negative numbers. and writing your own parser is a failure case by op's logic. they are complaining about the builtin parsing functions. the author admits you can parse signed integers in their second example, but for unsigned, they don't like seem to like that unsigned parsing will accept negative numbers and…
That's right. I don't like asking it to parse the number contained inside a string, and getting a different number as a result.
That's just simply not the right answer.
> I'm not sure what they mean by "output raw" vs "output"
I can see how that's very unclear. Changed now to "Readable".
I wasn't in this class myself, but one prof at my alma mater started his "Programming 201" class with the simplest assignment: write a C program that accepts two integers from the user and prints their sum. It actually was the only assignment for the rest of the semester, since he has a test suite that would humiliate the students gently at first, but would ultimately pipe a billion nines into stdin as the first argu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And how does this avoid returning nonsense if the number is too large? (Wrapping if the accumulator is unsigned, straight to UB land if signed.) Not reporting overflows as errors is one of the major problems demonstrated by TFA.
you could check if ret > ret * 10 + characters[i]-48, if so it has wrapped around and you return an error
As a C programmer, I find this kind of bad faith article very irritating. Yes, the standard library is bad. This is by far the worst part of the C legacy. But it is not that hard to write your own. String functions like this are not difficult at all, and you can use better naming and semantics, write faster code etc. C is not the C standard library, ffs.
Exactly. A wrapper that handles all of the edge cases properly and gives proper reporting just gets added to your own library of functions and the devs get used to using it. Much like the code for abstract data types like lists/hashmaps/etc which neither C nor the standard libraries provide. Bonus points for having bespoke linting rules to point out the use of known “bad” functions. In one old project we went through…
Similar to how strlcpy() is not a slam dunk fix to the strcpy() problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't use C enough to know what the convention is for throwing an error when the function can return a number anyway. You'd have to ask someone else
In C, errors are usually indicated by a negative return value constant, crashing the program with abort, or setting the errno global (thread-local, but whatever) and expecting callers to check it. Sometimes multiple of those.
One of the great virtues of C is that this sort of thing is not part of the language ...
I wasn't in this class myself, but one prof at my alma mater started his "Programming 201" class with the simplest assignment: write a C program that accepts two integers from the user and prints their sum. It actually was the only assignment for the rest of the semester, since he has a test suite that would humiliate the students gently at first, but would ultimately pipe a billion nines into stdin as the first argu…