Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 12:58:40 +0200 From: Hans-Bernhard Broeker Message-Id: <199808051058.MAA07903@acp3bf.physik.rwth-aachen.de> To: vcarlos35 AT juno DOT com Cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: HELP!!!! Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Organization: RWTH Aachen, III. physikalisches Institut B Precedence: bulk [This thread drifts further and further off topic. Anyway, I don't think the post I follow-up can be left standing as is...] In article <19980804 DOT 160420 DOT 5903 DOT 2 DOT vcarlos35 AT juno DOT com> you wrote: > On Tue, 04 Aug 1998 09:37:38 -0700 Nate Eldredge > writes: [...] > >I suggest that you get a book. I had success with "The C Programming > >Language" by Kerninghan and Ritchie. Here's a freebie example: > I would suggest a more recent book covering the ANSI C standard. The > K&R standard has been modified substantially. IIRC, their book was > published in the late 1970's. 1978, in fact. But you obviously haven't heard of the fact that they published a second edition, in 1988, which does cover ANSI C, and is so good at it that even today, i.e. another 10 years later, it's still the number one reference book recommended by all the gurus in comp.lang.c/comp.lang.c.moderated. They refer to it so often they even settled on an abbreviation for it: K&R2. It's most prominent feature, in both those experts' and my own opinion, is that K&R2 is almost completely free of errors. A fact that is *unbelievably* rare among C books. There are several books out there that contain more errors on a single page than you can find in all of K&R2 (meaning: about a handful). > It's also not that good for learning the basics of C programing. I object to this. The only problem with the book as a beginner-level introduction is that it assumes you know a bit about programming in general. They just describe what *C* is, without wasting time telling you what a CPU, memory, or a program actually is. They also don't tell you how to use an editor (but that's fine, as every platform differs in that respect, anyway). > The next example program after the "Hello, world!" one is a > temperature conversion program! So what? What's wrong about a temperature conversion program? And you also don't mention the almost three pages of concentrated information that they put in between these two first example programs. > Pascal is an evil language, IMHO of course. Can there be any other > reason for the assignment operator being "=:" instead of a sane "="? > I hate that colon. You may hate the colon, others detest '==' used as the comparison operator... Actually, I think ':=' (not '=:') is one of the cleverer ideas Wirth put into Pascal. The sometimes weird syntax of BEGIN/END in conjunction with 'ELSE' and ';' is way worse, IMHO. -- Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker AT physik DOT rwth-aachen DOT de) Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.