C for everyone else

http://wizardryandfunnyhats.com/2013/11/18/c-for-everyone-else/

by Herdinger • 13 years ago

14 10 13 years ago

unwind• 13 years ago

This is very well-intended, but it suffers from both lots of formatting errors and pure factual ones. It makes my highly conditioned (from Stack Overflow) C lecturing mode almost auto-trigger.

It's way too long to do a rebuttal here, though.

Some problems:

- Bad terminology ("C has no object", when in fact the term really is very useful in C even though it probably doesn't mean what you expect if you come from C++ or Python)

- "Booleans don't exist", I don't understand how the author can both acknowledge C99 and say this. Booleans do exist! Their name is not so user-friendly, unless you include stdbool.h, then you get bool, true and false.

- Pure random errors, like the first structure example code ("struct point foo={x: 5, y: 4};", what are those colons and numbers doing there?!)

And so on.

ethomson2• 13 years ago

Null terminated strings also don't allow us to use multibyte encodings such as utf-8.

This just makes me cry.

dllthomas3• 13 years ago

Because it is unfortunate or because it is incorrect?

dllthomas3• 13 years ago

The last is not an error, it's simply outdated:

http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Designated-Inits.html

These days, you should spell it:

    struct point foo = { .x = 5, .y = 4 };

Herdinger2• 13 years ago

As for booleans I don't consider macros and further macros which are part of the library as a datatype, but yes of course they are in the core language. What I wanted to express was that booleans are nothing more than integers with sugar sprinkled over the top. You're right.

Herdinger2• 13 years ago

Something tells me I shouldn't have done this out of an impulse. I basically hacked it away in 1 hour with one proofread. I felt on fire and wanted to push it out that probably wasn't such a good idea.

Of course you can represent utf8 in null terminated strings but you have to escape escape the null character, or if used as a terminator implicitly assume it's there. The basic jist of that was that I wanted to say, dont use byte encodings internally if you got large registers available and keep attention to null termination and it's pitfalls.

But justification beside I'm going to give it more time and reference check against the standard, refrase my intentions so that they are clear and probably shine more light on the positive aspects of the language and put it intro relation with other languages.

Hacker News isn't a place for pre alpha done in very little time drafts.

nobleach• 13 years ago

I think it definitely has potential. Throw it up on Github, and let people submit pull requests. Don't feel like you need to spend more of your time fixing the examples.

C for everyone else

Related Stories