Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/08/05/07:00:42
[This thread drifts further and further off topic. Anyway, I don't
think the post I follow-up can be left standing as is...]
In article <19980804 DOT 160420 DOT 5903 DOT 2 DOT vcarlos35 AT juno DOT com> you wrote:
> On Tue, 04 Aug 1998 09:37:38 -0700 Nate Eldredge <nate AT cartsys DOT com>
> writes:
[...]
> >I suggest that you get a book. I had success with "The C Programming
> >Language" by Kerninghan and Ritchie. Here's a freebie example:
> I would suggest a more recent book covering the ANSI C standard. The
> K&R standard has been modified substantially. IIRC, their book was
> published in the late 1970's.
1978, in fact. But you obviously haven't heard of the fact that they
published a second edition, in 1988, which does cover ANSI C, and is
so good at it that even today, i.e. another 10 years later, it's
still the number one reference book recommended by all the gurus in
comp.lang.c/comp.lang.c.moderated. They refer to it so often they even
settled on an abbreviation for it: K&R2.
It's most prominent feature, in both those experts' and my own
opinion, is that K&R2 is almost completely free of errors. A fact that
is *unbelievably* rare among C books. There are several books out
there that contain more errors on a single page than you can find in
all of K&R2 (meaning: about a handful).
> It's also not that good for learning the basics of C programing.
I object to this. The only problem with the book as a beginner-level
introduction is that it assumes you know a bit about programming in
general. They just describe what *C* is, without wasting time telling
you what a CPU, memory, or a program actually is. They also don't tell
you how to use an editor (but that's fine, as every platform differs
in that respect, anyway).
> The next example program after the "Hello, world!" one is a
> temperature conversion program!
So what? What's wrong about a temperature conversion program?
And you also don't mention the almost three pages of concentrated
information that they put in between these two first example programs.
> Pascal is an evil language, IMHO of course. Can there be any other
> reason for the assignment operator being "=:" instead of a sane "="?
> I hate that colon.
You may hate the colon, others detest '==' used as the comparison
operator... Actually, I think ':=' (not '=:') is one of the cleverer
ideas Wirth put into Pascal. The sometimes weird syntax of BEGIN/END
in conjunction with 'ELSE' and ';' is way worse, IMHO.
--
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker AT physik DOT rwth-aachen DOT de)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.
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