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I personally find Steele's C: A Reference Manual far more useful in day to day hacking. But, that's one of four Steele-authored language specs I look at freque
by larsberg 17y ago
I personally find Steele's C: A Reference Manual far more useful in day to day hacking.
But, that's one of four Steele-authored language specs I look at frequently (Common LISP, Scheme, and Fortress), so I might just have carefully tuned my search methods to his writing style.
- kijuhygfhjk 17y agoBut Steele isn't much thicker. It's not hard to see that he was sticking to the K&R philosophy .
- hga 17y agoNot really, unless page count is your only metric. If you've read any of Steele's other language definition books (I've read all of the first Common Lisp one and some of the Java 3rd edition), you'll see it's clearly in the same style as the others. Also not entirely like the Scheme Revised Reports, which really set the standard for conciseness ^_^.
- andrewcooke 17y agoi never realised that was the same guy steele! (to be fair, it's harbison and steele, so he's second author and it's not clear how much was his work). i've mentioned preferring this book over k&r here before, but as someone pointed out they do slightly different things - k&r is more about teaching how to use c. but apart from all that, how come you get to use fortress frequently? what are you doing? is it becoming more popular? has it survived oracle?
- hga 17y agoI found K&R great ... until I got to the arrays and pointers chapter. It wasn't my inability to get the concept, I think, the Lions' Commentary n UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code which I tried next did the trick. And nowadays I too keep Harbison and Steele handy, I lost track of my copy of K&R sometime in the '80s.