Learn C The Hard Way by Zed Shaw

Post by byproxy » Tue, Jun 12, 2012, 2:53 AM UTC

aphyr wrote: post #45

byproxy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a little something that irked me: Guitar however is a weird instrument that doesn't really work with notation, so guitarists have an alternative notation called "tablature". This is incorrect. Guitar works perfectly fine with standard notation. It may be somewhat difficult to figure out fingerings if the music isn't arranged for guitar, but it's not much harder than playing piano without fingering information. I…

Huh, really? I always figured piano had an unambiguous mapping from pitch to keys, whereas guitar typically has 2 or 3 possible fingerings for a given pitch. I find it pretty easy to get stuck with awkward positions on my first few times through a guitar piece--except those in which transitional notes are annotated with fret positions. Is that what you mean by "arranged for guitar"?

Post by campnic » Tue, Jun 12, 2012, 3:50 AM UTC

jheriko wrote: post #57

zedshaw wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I explain all the many reasons this is the wrong way to think about it in the end.

Your argument with permutations of inputs is wrong IMO - this argument can be used to claim that any functionality which calls user code (through callbacks, inheritance, whatever, functors) is also defective. Strictly it may be so, but the defectiveness is massively outweighed by the convenience - the most obvious example is calling a late-binding function - but it extends to easier to grasp examples like the C qsort…

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 12, 2012, 5:05 AM UTC

zedshaw wrote: post #32

Jabbles wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit like claiming memcpy() is bugged because it can crash your program. Well, true, it is good style to program defensively against memory corruptions, buffer overflows etc, and in that respect K&R may teach students bad habits. I think it's a bit much to say that it should never have been written like that, as at the time people knew so much less about building complex projects, sources of error and defensive…

memcpy is just fine because it has a size parameter. I think you mean strcpy(), which does cause defects.

Post by zedshaw » Tue, Jun 12, 2012, 7:37 AM UTC

byproxy wrote: post #44

waffle_ss wrote: post #24

I was wondering how this compares with or compliments K&R, when I came across [this section][1] of the book that seems to slap it in the face. Here's a section from the second paragraph: You see, "K&R C" is actually riddled with bugs and bad style. Its age is no excuse. These were bugs when they wrote the first printing, and the 42nd printing. I hadn't actually realized just how bad most of the code was in this book…

Just a little something that irked me: Guitar however is a weird instrument that doesn't really work with notation, so guitarists have an alternative notation called "tablature". This is incorrect. Guitar works perfectly fine with standard notation. It may be somewhat difficult to figure out fingerings if the music isn't arranged for guitar, but it's not much harder than playing piano without fingering information. I…

Post by zedshaw » Tue, Jun 12, 2012, 7:42 AM UTC

jheriko wrote: post #53

I did look at this book a while ago, I was unable to make amendments to the code examples. early versions made common C gotcha mistakes, although of the more subtle and less disasterous kinds... starting with non-standard entry-point function signature and generally relying on non-standard features of particular compilers. fortunately someone else seems to have gotten there in the end... i'd be wary, simply because t…