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Comment by spankyspangler | Hacker News Reader

Is this supposed to be a trick question? All do virtually the same thing at their core, differing in where they take their input from and whether they are the C11 bounds checking variants. You can add all the v prefix variants too, doesn't really make things more difficult.

You could have thrown in a bunch of functions from string(3), but even then... C string handling isn't great by any means, but it isn't vast or complicated either.

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You can learn the C stdlib+system headers, but at that point you're doing something more or less equivalent to learning a high level language's features, and you're past the simplicity of K&R.

I'm not sure what you mean. C is a high level language. And yes it and standard library has obviously grown more complex than it was 50 years ago.

It's small and easy to grasp the entire thing though, unlike most other more modern high level languages.

That said, it's not entirely clear that matters too much. Almost any non-toy C project is going to be bringing in libraries outside libc, so you still need to go off and learn those if you want to work on a project. Doesn't really matter whether they're in the base language or not.

Ready for a random question out of the 200+ UB cases on the ISO C, or about a random feature from any C compiler?

I'm not sure if you replied to the wrong comment or not because it doesn't address what I wrote.

I surely replied to the right comment,

> It's small and easy to grasp the entire thing though, unlike most other more modern high level languages.

So ready for the question?

> I surely replied to the right comment,

Oh, well it didn't address what I wrote.

> So ready for the question?

Doesn't address what I wrote.

> It's small and easy to grasp the entire thing though,

Whatever

If you asked some dumb question and I answered it, it wouldn't change your mind would it? If it did, then your position is so flimsy it's laughable. Just make a point in plain language rather than rhetorical questions that vaguely relate to the comment but are lazy incomplete thoughts that don't actually address what was written.

You would have a point about knowing exactly every single corner case of the language. I don't think that's easy even for C. Fortunately I didn't claim it was either.

> grasp

> You would have a point about knowing exactly every single corner case of the language. I don't think that's easy even for C. Fortunately I didn't claim it was either.

You said "It's small and easy to grasp the entire thing though, unlike most other more modern high level languages."

The entire thing doesn't include corners? And you entered the conversation in support of someone that literally said "every corner, nook and cranny"! If you were making a much weaker claim, it's on you to make that clear. Instead of this petty "doesn't address what I wrote" garbage.

On top of that, being able to suss out what is undefined behavior is in fact quite important for proper use of C. I wish it was a super rare corner case but it's not.