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That's how I learnt C too. Couldn't grok how pointers worked. Took a few months to work with assembly. Returned. Didn't have to read any C tutorial. Everything

That's how I learnt C too. Couldn't grok how pointers worked. Took a few months to work with assembly. Returned. Didn't have to read any C tutorial. Everything came naturally

WalterBright 5y ago
Fortunately, I picked up the K+R book after I was an experienced PDP-11 assembler programmer. I had never heard of C before, and basically just flipped through the pages and instantly got it. I quit all the other languages then, too, and switched to C.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  To be fair though that's just an extremely well put together book. It's exceptional. I happen to have the Second Editions of both Kernighan & Ritchie and of Stroustrup's much more long-winded book about his language sitting near this PC. Even without looking at the actual material the indices give the game away. If I am wondering about a concept in K&R and can't instantly find it from memory, the index will take me straight there. Contrast Stroustrup where the index may lack an entry for an important topic (presumably it was in great part or entirely machine generated and the machine has no idea what a "topic" is, it's just matching words) or there may be a reference but it's for the wrong page (the perils of not-so-bright automatic index generation) and so the reader must laboriously do the index's job for it. Now, today that's not such a big deal, I have electronic copies of reference works and so I have search but these aren't books from 2022, Stroustrup wrote his book in 1991 and the 2nd edition of K&R is a little older. This mattered when they were written, and when I first owned them. K&R is a much better book than almost any other on the topic. The book, I would argue, actually holds up much better in 2022 than the language.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > the perils of not-so-bright Fortunately, my parents defined me out of that category.
mhh__ 5y ago
There are apparently whole books written about C pointers. It's definitely a topic where the best (?) way to teach it, in my view, is to sit there and just force a student to watch everything I do while I answer questions since you need a push over the activation energy to be able to work things out yourself.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > There are apparently whole books written about C pointers. Spend 30 minutes teaching him assembly, and the pointer problem will vanish.
astrange 5y ago
Unfortunately that's not quite how C pointers work - there are also things called pointer provenance, type aliasing, and out of bounds UB.

That's how I learnt C too. Couldn't grok how pointers worked. Took a few months to work with assembly. Returned. Didn't have to read any C tutorial. Everything came naturally

WalterBright 5y ago

Fortunately, I picked up the K+R book after I was an experienced PDP-11 assembler programmer. I had never heard of C before, and basically just flipped through the pages and instantly got it. I quit all the other languages then, too, and switched to C.

tialaramex 5y ago
To be fair though that's just an extremely well put together book. It's exceptional. I happen to have the Second Editions of both Kernighan & Ritchie and of Stroustrup's much more long-winded book about his language sitting near this PC. Even without looking at the actual material the indices give the game away. If I am wondering about a concept in K&R and can't instantly find it from memory, the index will take me straight there. Contrast Stroustrup where the index may lack an entry for an important topic (presumably it was in great part or entirely machine generated and the machine has no idea what a "topic" is, it's just matching words) or there may be a reference but it's for the wrong page (the perils of not-so-bright automatic index generation) and so the reader must laboriously do the index's job for it. Now, today that's not such a big deal, I have electronic copies of reference works and so I have search but these aren't books from 2022, Stroustrup wrote his book in 1991 and the 2nd edition of K&R is a little older. This mattered when they were written, and when I first owned them. K&R is a much better book than almost any other on the topic. The book, I would argue, actually holds up much better in 2022 than the language.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > the perils of not-so-bright Fortunately, my parents defined me out of that category.

mhh__ 5y ago

There are apparently whole books written about C pointers. It's definitely a topic where the best (?) way to teach it, in my view, is to sit there and just force a student to watch everything I do while I answer questions since you need a push over the activation energy to be able to work things out yourself.

WalterBright 5y ago
> There are apparently whole books written about C pointers. Spend 30 minutes teaching him assembly, and the pointer problem will vanish.

astrange 5y ago

Unfortunately that's not quite how C pointers work - there are also things called pointer provenance, type aliasing, and out of bounds UB.