C books (was "K&R C book wanted")

Simon Burton simonb at webone.com.au
Sun Jul 28 23:09:02 EST 2002


My father is a c coder.
I will inherit his copy of K&R one day.
It is older than me.

My standard argument against C++ is that
i don't want to parse it. Somehow i always
end up parsing my code because i want to
wrap it (eg. SWIG) or serialize it (genstruct)
or, i hope (in the future), code analysis
eg. for refactoring.

Having said that, i have Schildt's C++ book,
and use it occasionaly as a C reference.
Also, i agree with the OO-C sentiment, but
see OO-C as a preparation/motivation for
C++, not so much the other way around.
It was Tridge who really inspired me to
"enjoy" c coding; he said he had never touched
an OO language, and somehow all his beautiful
emacs coloured c code just made it all
obvious and easy. 

oh boy, it's getting late,
simon



On Sun, 28 Jul 2002 21:02:48 +1000
Jason Stokes <jstok at bluedog.apana.org.au> wrote:

> 
> I think the assumption is that everyone these days will want to learn
> C++, which is almost (no holy war will correspondance will be entered
> into) a perfect superset of C anyway.   Most new pure C code I see (eg,
> everything in the GTK and Gnome project) which is coded in C seems to
> emulate C++ features like classes and polymorphism to a greater or
> lesser extent  -- indeed, the whole design of the basic Unix API could
> be considered an emulation of "object oriented" concepts (everything's a
> file, with various specialisations for particular /kinds/ of file)
> before C++ was available.
> 
> So, ironically, you can gain a greater understanding of a lot of the C
> code you see by learning C++.
> 




More information about the linux mailing list