On Tue, 2008-04-08 at 15:27 -0400, Steven W. Orr wrote:
> On Tuesday, Apr 8th 2008 at 13:39 -0000, quoth Les:
>
> =>On Tue, 2008-04-08 at 09:39 -0600, Robin Laing wrote:
> =>> max bianco wrote:
> =>> > I want to learn C and I know there are quite a few programmers on this
> =>> > list. I am looking for a couple of good books on learning C. I am not
> =>> > exactly a beginner but I am no expert and i would like to start going
> =>> > over everything from scratch.
>
> One thing I've noticed over the years is that the majority of C coders out
> there, no matter how good they are, never really master the ability to
> composed and decompose complex declarations and references. I don't say
> this in a perjorative fashion, but I see it a lot and it's important to be
> able to distinguish between an array of pointers to integers and a pointer
> to an array of integers, i.e.,
>
> int *foo[10];
> int (*foo)[10];
>
> Going through K&R is standard, but this is a basic complaint I've had for
> a long time.
This comment reminded me of the fabulously useful little utility cdecl
(and its cousin c++decl) which translates between the English
description of a declaration in C (resp. C++) and the actual C (resp.
C++) code itself.
So I went to try them and discovered they weren't installed.
So I went to install them and discovered that they are no longer in the
repository.
That's a shame. Anyone know why they were dropped?
--
Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
