I'm pretty sure I still have mywafer-thin first-edition "The C
Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchey that I bought from the
Caltech bookstore in the Spring of 1983, for use in Computational
Physics.
I had some trouble at first with C's lack of a Boolean type. The
result is that I still have Line 7 of Page 41 memorized verbatim - as
well as the advice's precise page and line numbers:
"True just means non-zero."
I'm pretty sure the much weightier second edition, which covered ANSI
C, contains the exact same statement.
Kids These Days. You simply have not lived until you have written
"K&R C" - as opposed to "ANSI C". That is C without prototypes;
you're lucky if you get a forward reference.
The following is perfectly legal K&R C:
#include <stdio.h>
main()
int argc;
char **argv;
{
printf( "Hello, World!\n" );
return 0;
}
There was a period of a couple years of my early career where a
significant portion of my work was going through huge codebases to add
ANSI C prototypes and to declare ints explicitly rather than having
them just assumed where such assumptions were legal.
Dennis Ritchey may be a diety but he is not quite a God. God Almighty
would have had function prototypes from the very start.
Ever Faithful,
Don Quixote
--
Don Quixote de la Mancha
Dulcinea Technologies Corporation
Software of Elegance and Beauty
http://www.dulcineatech.com
quixote@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
--
users mailing list
users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe or change subscription options:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users
Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
