On 05/24/2017 04:56 AM, nore...@z505.com wrote:
On 2017-05-22 18:53, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
On 2017-05-22 23:39, nore...@z505.com wrote:
What about Rust or plain C? Or Digital Mars D?
I hate C with a passion. I'll never code in that ever again.
Pascal and C are actually twin brothers with slightly different syntax...
But my biggest hate for C is not C itself but just the one fact that
it lacks strings.
Yes, this is one of the horrible things I have beef with. I have several.
1) the null terminated "strings"
2) the fact that the array size is not exactly part of the type. In case
you're wondering what this means, if you declare:
int a[5];
sizeof(a) gives you the correct size of the array. However, if you pass
this array as a parameter to a function:
void func(int array_param[5])
{
// inside the function, sizeof(array_param) gives you the size
of a pointer, and not the array size
}
That's one of the reasons you can't add range checking to C compilers.
3) the fact that you can get easily burned by typing '=' instead of '=='
(or vice versa).
Both
if (i=5)
do_something();
and
i==5;
Will happily compile and _not_ do the expected thing. Modern C compilers
give you warnings in these cases, but that doesn't change the fact that
this is bad language design. Bonus points for the fact that writing this
ugliness:
if (5 == i)
do_something();
is considered a very good practice by some people, just because it
prevents you from being burned if you write if (5 = i) instead :)
4) the badly designed standard library. Even though C "strings" suck by
design, the library functions, that operate on them have extra hidden
traps. For example, using strcpy is unsafe, because it doesn't check the
size of the destination buffer, that's why you must use strncpy.
However, this code:
char dest[1000];
strncpy(dest, src, sizeof(dest));
is still unsafe. Why? Because if src is 1000 characters or larger, even
though strncpy will not overwrite past the end of the dest array, it
will _not_ put a null terminator in the dest array. On top of that, it
is also suboptimal - if src is shorter, strncpy will fill the entire
array past the end of the string with null characters. So, if src is a
10 character string, strncpy will write 990 null characters, filling the
area between dest[10] and dest[999], wasting CPU cycles on that.
Nikolay
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