Matthew Saltzman wrote:
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?
I found six places to D/L the "source" for cdecl, none of which will
compile on FC6 or FC8. I am going to try the sources from RH9 as soon as
I pull them off an old CD, if that doesn't work I will beat on the
sources I have, which I'm sure can be gotten working with minimal
effort, although they are all 1996 or 2001 versions.
If someone else finds a copy which compiles out of the box, let me know,
I can't seem to find the old Fedora source archives where my bookmark
leads me.
--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
