The C programming language

--- Geoff Roberts <geoffrob(a)stmarks.pp.catholic.edu.au> wrote: Allowing is the keyword here. I've seen some stuff that just took my breath away and I've also seen stuff that made me retch. It's been said that C has all the power of assembler with all the legibility of assembler. If you've ever taken C and compiled it on a PDP-11 and looked at the output, you'll quickly notice that many of the "features" of the language translate to very few instructions - it's assembler shorthand, essentially. This, to me, is a benfit, not a detriment, but I _like_ assembler, especially PDP-11 MACRO (and it's relatives like the MC68K) Rubbish. My first language was BASIC (like so many kids in the late 1970s), followed quickly by 1802 and 6502 machine language (no compiler - stuff entered in hex), then, about six years after I started programming, C. Working at SRC in 1984, I saw that we had a UNIX machine nestled amongst the VAXen running VMS. It was a VAX-11/750 w/2Mb RAM and two RK07 drives. I don't have the drives (they were discarded in 1992), but I do have _that_ 11/750 (s/n BT000354) now upgraded to 8Mb w/SI9900, Fuji Eagle, etc. We swapped out different sets of RK07 packs to run various Unices to conform to the customer's configuration - 4.0BSD, 4.1BSD and SYSIII, IIRC. I still have the VAX SYSIII tapes somewhere, but who knows if they are still legible after all this time. Anyway, way back then, I'd heard about UNIX and decided I wanted a piece of it. I got an account, borrowed a copy of the K&R book and used it as a reference to write my first C program. It was an abomination as far as style goes, but it did work - it converted a text table of board handle numbers into a formatted picture of the contents of all of our PDP-11 and VAXen, a job I'd do today in perl and probably HTML. What I've found from personal experience is that to really _learn_ a programming language, I need a project to keep me going past the learning cliff. With 6502 assembler, it was hand-compiling Scott Adams' adventure engine from BASIC (a story I've been happily able to share with him many years later); with Java, it's my program to calculate sunset/sunrise charts for my Antarctic web page; with Inform it was translating Zork from MDL. It can be a monster project or a few dozen K of source, but the important part is having a motivational goal to complete. I never learned a programming language in school, only by rolling up my sleeves, going into larval mode once again and banging out a fun project. Just for the record, I am very fond of C. Yes, atrocities have been committed in it, but it's right up there with perl and assembler as my favorite tools to get the job done. Just be sure that you use the right tool for the right job. -ethan ===== Even though my old e-mail address is no longer going to vanish, please note my new public address: erd(a)iname.com The original webpage address is still going away. The permanent home is: http://penguincentral.com/ See http://ohio.voyager.net/ for details. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com