As opposed to say, “Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! A Beginner's Guide” which is 881 pages and doesn’t even moderately cover the prelude.
Anyway, C is an amazing language and I keep a K&R on my phone as a pdf
That says something about the C programming language design, that I as a deeply stack based FORTH programmer and explicitly parenthetical LISP programmer find horrible.
I've been programming in C for years and never had an issue with operator precedence.
For example: I really like HP calculators, so I'm in several facebook groups for fans of RPN/RPL and HP specifically. Sometimes a few of them go way too far out of their way to try to demonstrate how inferior algebraic systems must be.
For the record, my copy of K&R wants to open into either section 7.6 or appendix B. No idea what this says about me, though.
> Just use parentheses
Not sure what that has to do with memory usage..?
mrguyorama just implied that the only reason you would check the operator precedence chart would be to shave a few bytes off the size of your source code, which has not been a reasonable reason to do anything for many decades, and yet C programmers seem to like to do it anyway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKHaNIEa6kA
It's about the poor people who read your code that relies on both you and them having perfectly memorized every single little detail of operator precedence and associativity, instead of simply and consistently using parenthesis.
Quick without looking: can you tell me what the precedence and associativity of the ternary ?: operator is?
The designer of PHP got it wrong (which isn't surprising given his proudly self proclaimed contempt towards computer science and incompetence at parser writing), but then millions of PHP programmers also learned it the wrong way.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf
Do you really want any of those people who were corrupted by PHP messing around with your code, if you relied on it being one way, and they assume it works the other way?
It's not that you can't tell what it actually does, it's that you can't tell what the person who wrote it actually meant, which is more important than what it actually does, especially when it has bugs.
Don't do many operations on one line, AND do use parenthesis, AND do use indentation, with no exceptions except for very simple expressions. Take every opportunity to use line breaks and vertical alignment to make symmetry and repetition and nesting visually obvious, like:
float distance =
sqrt(
(x * x) +
(y * y))
Just use parenthesis, and put a comment on it, sailor.
https://wellcomecollection.org/works/m33njwx3/items
My copy of The Little Schemer won't open to page 13 because of the jelly stains.
https://vpb.smallyu.net/[Type]%20books/The%20Little%20Scheme...
I'm glad you enjoy Forth so much, I guess. I'm sure postfix will catch on any day now.
Well that's what I do. If you're having to look it up to write it, you're going to have to look it up to read it again down the line.
Page 1 starts: "Chapter 0: Introduction".
It wasn't, so any C application that is more than a toy hello world with stdio, pings back into POSIX for any kind of meaningful work, that wants to stay cross platform.
Basically it the the C runtime library, that wasn't part of ISO.
I use JVM, .NET, Web and C++, not caring if the runtimes are bare metal or running on top of an OS, type 1 hypervisor, or whatever.
If you're downloading a JVM binary, you're missing out on the build step. It's C dependent, friend. How do you think that VM interfaces with the OS? Go on. Try it. ldd the java executable.
It's libc all the way down. C itself is a sort of "VM" specification utilized to create the tools to run the tools to build the tools that make other high level languages possible.
Unless you create something entirely custom in platform specific assembly, you're running on C at some level.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is specified in an ISO standard, and basically specifies what a UNIX operating system's programmable interfaces are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX
POSIX also specifies stuff like "awk must be made available". Is that what you think the C programming language specifies?
POSIX is an IEEE standard (example [1]). POSIX defines the Operating System API. You can see the C implementation of this API here[2].
> so any C application that is more than a toy hello world with stdio, pings back into POSIX for any kind of meaningful work
Simply calling printf relies on writing to a file descriptor. A "Hello world" application on linux uses posix. ANY hello world application uses posix. Even your Java Hello world App will call into the posix APIs. `System.out.println` isn't magic. It calls into the C posix implementation.
If you want to do anything in any language (write to files, create threads, allocate memory, network communication), you need to go through the OS. POSIX is what defines that OS interface.
> I use JVM, .NET, Web and C++, not caring if the runtimes are bare metal or running on top of an OS, type 1 hypervisor, or whatever.
So you use POSIX, you just don't think about it.
I suppose you could compare it to a table saw. C is one without a guard or any other safety measures, so you need to be careful not to cut your fingers off. More modern languages have the guard and break etc.
For general use you probably do want all the safety bits, but occasionally it is useful to be able to take it off to do a weird cut on a weird bit of wood.
None of that necessarily means you will cut your fingers off though.