[sdiy] how to learn C?

[Tom Wiltshire]

On 8 Jan 2011, at 12:48, Andre Majorel wrote:

> This is probably an unfashionable opinion but I think that the
> first thing you should learn is how the hardware works. Bits,
> bytes, memory addresses. How text, positive integers and
> positive integers larger than 255 are encoded. The basic
> operation of a microprocessor (program counter, jumps and
> branches, stack, subroutine calls, loads and stores).
> 
> Once you have a clear picture of that in your head, much of C is
> obvious. You will be able to write fast and compact software.
> And you will have the satisfaction of knowing what you are doing
> instead of throwing code at the compiler and hoping it works.

In general, I agree with Andre, but I have to say that "much of C is obvious" is not entirely true - or perhaps I'm dealing with the bits that aren't (Probably - trust my luck!). I've been doing lots of assembler, so I've got the underlying understanding.
I'm finding the syntax of some parts of C is awkward, bordering irritating. For example, you could do the following in C:

a = b;

Bet you didn't realise that 'a' is a pointer, and 'b' is an array in that snippet, and that I want the pointer to be the address of the array, did you?! Oh, wait! Actually 'a' is a variable equal to 5, and I want 'b' to be 5 too! No? Talk about ambiguous.

I could have made it slightly clearer, but you mostly don't see it done this way:

a =&b;

 A lot of the time, readability in C seems to come down to consistent variable naming conventions by the programmer, rather than being enforced by the language.  Things get even worse when you start using "typedef"s and function pointers (be sure to follow the convention of using "_t" at the end of "typedef" defined types or you'll never know what you're looking at. The syntax looks like it was dreamed up for the simple cases and then dragged kicking and screaming into a situation where you could use more sophisticated stuff. The syntax for defining function pointers looks like the meaningless bracket monster vomited on your code, and you *will* throw code at the compiler several times before you get it right. I guess I'd like to be programming in "D" or "E" instead of "C".

Still, it's the tools we've got, so here I am, learning it.

T.