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This chapter is explicitly teaching people what the author's idea of bad C code is: It has them read some, then tells them specifically what the gotchas are, th
by mechanical_fish 15y ago
This chapter is explicitly teaching people what the author's idea of bad C code is: It has them read some, then tells them specifically what the gotchas are, then asks them to code up test cases for the flaws and run them through Valgrind.
Where's the "avoiding" here?
And which of the skills being exercised - imagining what kinds of bad things could happen, writing executable test cases, detecting segfaults - are not useful in the real world?
- marshray 15y agoHow about being able to work on a team of other programmers without insisting that everything ought to be done you own, completely unique, way? If he truly had a better, more correct, way to write C code I would join him in trying to change the world. But the first example he gives is just factually wrong.
- tedunangst 15y ago"we avoided classic style C strings in this book" There's the avoiding. The skills being exercised are not a problem, it's the skill not being exercised that is a problem. You cannot be a competent C programmer without understanding strings and their relevant library functions.
- zedshaw 15y agoThat's basically the point of this chapter. It's getting people to think like a hacker and try to break the code in unintended ways. That makes them better programmers and helps when avoiding common mistakes in C code. Using K&R to do this is to give people a set of known good C code samples and show how even those can be broken and misused.
- ori_b 15y agoNoble goal, but the way the chapter is written doesn't really come across that way, in my opinion.
- aptwebapps 15y agoSpeaking as someone who doesn't know C, hasn't read K&R, but who (usually!) has decent reading comprehension, it _does_ come across this way. He's completely explicit about what he's doing and why. I don't understand how people can read that and still feel that he's being unfair. Maybe I'm just too literal-minded.
- ori_b 15y agoCalling string manipulation functions buggy and broken because they fail when you don't pass them a string is both wrong and silly.
- bonzoesc 15y agoHow do you test that something in C is a string?
- tedunangst 15y agoYou don't, because you can't. That's basically the same as the beginner question, "How can you test if a pointer has been freed?"
- bonzoesc 15y agoIt was a rhetorical question. What's the sense in having functions that operate on "strings" if you can't figure out what a "string" is at runtime? It's much saner to have functions operate on "strings that are 80 characters or less" or "a structure containing a integer `length` and an array of `length` chars."
- ori_b 15y agoWhat's the sense in having functions that operate on "pointers to valid memory" if you can't figure out if it's "valid memory" at runtime? The point is that the function is not buggy. You may not like the specification for it. You may think it should be designed differently. This is not the same as the code being buggy.