3 ms·

I'm just shouting into the void here, but why does anyone find it acceptable that C is almost fifty years old– a half-century– and we still have new articles pu

I'm just shouting into the void here, but why does anyone find it acceptable that C is almost fifty years old– a half-century– and we still have new articles published about the correct way to copy memory. And then, immediately following them, comments in responds to those articles saying the article is wrong and that you should actually do it this other way. Nobody has figured this out in 50 years?

legohead 8y ago
I'm with you. I started with C some ~20 years ago, and you learn very early on about null terminating strings. You are constantly thinking about it for every manipulation you do. This article isn't exactly ground breaking news. It smells more like an amateur just got bit and decided to write up a blog about it.
kazinator 8y ago
A few new people have to learn this stuff. That's not just to maintain legacy code. Computers do not have nicely behaved, safe, garbage collected strings. Someone has to understand the code for how that stuff is bootstrapped, and that code is going to have gunky memory copies in it where a one word mistake will bring down the show.
krapp 8y ago
The problem is - what even is a "string" in C? An arbitrary number of arbitrary bytes that you hope ends in a null, but you'll never know unless you check, and even when you check, do you really know? Was that null really where that string was supposed to end? There's never going to be a single, universally valid and correct way to deal with a "type" that is structurally just a step above random garbage.
pjmlp 8y ago
It runs deep than that. C suffers from a macho culture, where many developers deeply believe that only the others do mistakes. Even Dennis was quite clear that C was not supposed to be used without help from lint (developed in 1979). "Although the first edition of K&R described most of the rules that brought C's type structure to its present form, many programs written in the older, more relaxed style persisted, and so did compilers that tolerated it. To encourage people to pay more attention to the official language rules, to detect legal but suspicious constructions, and to help find interface mismatches undetectable with simple mechanisms for separate compilation, Steve Johnson adapted his pcc compiler to produce lint [Johnson 79b], which scanned a set of files and remarked on dubious constructions." -- https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html Guess how many do run lint or any other static analyzers as part of their build.

legohead 8y ago

I'm with you. I started with C some ~20 years ago, and you learn very early on about null terminating strings. You are constantly thinking about it for every manipulation you do. This article isn't exactly ground breaking news. It smells more like an amateur just got bit and decided to write up a blog about it.

kazinator 8y ago

A few new people have to learn this stuff. That's not just to maintain legacy code. Computers do not have nicely behaved, safe, garbage collected strings. Someone has to understand the code for how that stuff is bootstrapped, and that code is going to have gunky memory copies in it where a one word mistake will bring down the show.

krapp 8y ago

The problem is - what even is a "string" in C? An arbitrary number of arbitrary bytes that you hope ends in a null, but you'll never know unless you check, and even when you check, do you really know? Was that null really where that string was supposed to end? There's never going to be a single, universally valid and correct way to deal with a "type" that is structurally just a step above random garbage.

pjmlp 8y ago

It runs deep than that. C suffers from a macho culture, where many developers deeply believe that only the others do mistakes. Even Dennis was quite clear that C was not supposed to be used without help from lint (developed in 1979). "Although the first edition of K&R described most of the rules that brought C's type structure to its present form, many programs written in the older, more relaxed style persisted, and so did compilers that tolerated it. To encourage people to pay more attention to the official language rules, to detect legal but suspicious constructions, and to help find interface mismatches undetectable with simple mechanisms for separate compilation, Steve Johnson adapted his pcc compiler to produce lint [Johnson 79b], which scanned a set of files and remarked on dubious constructions." -- https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html Guess how many do run lint or any other static analyzers as part of their build.