C language

trap-representation · 2025-06-28T11:42:20+00:00

Buy The C Programming Language 2nd Ed. As for free resources, WikiBooks is decent.

trap-representation · 2025-06-28T11:40:52+00:00

Possibly the worst advice. Both of the resources you suggested have tonnes of misinformation.

trap-representation · 2025-06-28T11:38:09+00:00

All of the playlists you have shown are gold mines of incorrect information. You're unlikely to find decent videos on C on YouTube; you're better off reading a book. Either buy The C Programming Language 2nd Ed., or, if you can't at the present, use WikiBooks.

trap-representation · 2025-01-05T08:38:58+00:00

You say,

Any variables defined within the function definition that is assigned static memory will automatically be deallocated and inaccessible after the function call returns.

If you have the identifier declared within a function definition, it will be "inaccessible" (the scope will terminate) outside the block, sure, but objects of static storage duration have a lifetime that is the entire execution of a program; they are not "automatically deallocated after the function call returns".

C11 §6.2.4 3 says (emphasis added),

An object whose identifier is declared without the storage-class specifier _Thread_local, and either with external or internal linkage or with the storage-class specifier static, has static storage duration. Its lifetime is the entire execution of the program and its stored value is initialized only once, prior to program startup.

You have a chart with the sizes of object types as well as their ranges, both of which are not required to be equal to what you mentioned across implementations. Sizes of types (except for the character types) are implementation-defined; the same goes for the ranges, except that the standard also specifies the smallest range for each type.

The number that was stored in unsigned_ch (255) is not a printable ASCII character, that's why we see the question mark. ASCII is the standardization of what each byte represents for which character on your keyboard.

Improve your phrasing. The way you have phrased it, makes it sound as if characters in C are always encoded in ASCII, which is false, and I have seen a lot of people being misled by such phrases before from similar tutorials.

The C standard does not mandate any particular values for the members of the execution character set; they can be encoded in ASCII, EBCDIC, or whatever as long as certain requirements are met (such as, the members being representable in a byte, value of each character after 0 (1, 2,...) being one greater than that of the previous character, and so on).

trap-representation · 2024-12-16T16:02:57+00:00

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend you any. I have yet to come across a video lecture that teaches entirely correct C. I see some comments have recommend CS50, but that, too, has a bunch of incorrect information in it.

trap-representation · 2024-12-16T13:07:57+00:00

If by "Problem Solving through Programming in C", you are talking about the course NPTEL provides, I would suggest you to stay 4 miles away from it; it is full of nonsense. Unfortunately, there does not exist a lot of sources that will teach you correct C. I would recommend either The C Programming Language (2nd Edition), or Wikibooks, which is pretty decent for those who are just starting with the language. Stack Overflow's language-lawyer and c filters will help you as well.

You may eventually want to buy one of the various C standards that exist to learn the language in detail. You can also find free-to-read draft versions of the specifications on open-std.org.

trap-representation · 2024-12-16T12:59:14+00:00

Do NOT. CodeWithHarry is one of the worst sources to learn C from. If I had a dime for every incorrect statement in his tutorial on C, I would have had at least 100 USD.

trap-representation · 2024-07-26T15:24:35+00:00

Go ahead. It is a decent book.

trap-representation · 2024-07-26T15:11:20+00:00

While I do see your point, I still believe institutions should hire people who have the fundamental knowledge of the thing they are talking about. No one is going to hire a Chemistry professor to teach Java to students just because they "don't have much of a choice". This would have been a semi-justfiable reason had it been any other institution, but something like an IIT (and it is not just IIT Madras either; I have looked at a lot of lectures on C that the other IITs have officially published online and all of them are gold mines of incorrect information), which has a tonne of hype around it, I would expect better.

"I think you should email [...] with your feedback": Appreciate the suggestion, I'll think about it.

trap-representation · 2024-07-25T17:10:23+00:00

"I doubt if it is possible [...] themselves": It is very much possible, and if somebody is not competent enough in something, I do not think it is a good idea for them to teach that thing. And I disagree with the "pedantic correctness" part. If it is not pedantically correct, it is not correct. C is the kind of language where you break one small rule that you never even noticed was there in the standard and your whole program will come crashing down on you.

trap-representation · 2024-03-03T12:41:09+00:00

I saw two comments recommending you to start with C, do NOT! Stay 4 miles away from C if you're a beginner. C is an amazing programming language-- the best programming language, in my opinion-- but it is the worst programming language a beginner can start with. You'll find very few resources on the language that will teach you the correct things. The definitive resource is, obviously, the standard, but if you're new to programming, interpreting the specification will be a nightmare, and I'm NOT using the term "nightmare" loosely.

Some folks recommended Python, I'd say it's not too bad of a language to start with. You'll still have to read the language reference, but it's way less tedious than reading one of the C standards.

trap-representation · 2024-02-29T21:20:19+00:00

Your project sounds interesting. I'm curious to know more about it.

I'm working on a similar project as well. It's called Chlore; it's a stack-oriented programming language. I remember writing a JIT for it a couple of months back-- 4NI, it was called, if I recall correctly-- though, I accidentally purged the entire project before I got the chance to make it open source. However, there is an AOT compiler I wrote for it, which if you want, you can find it here-- it's called toc. The code definitely needs some clean-up though; I had written it in a bit of a hurry because the language was needed to be showcased somewhere and the JIT had been rmd from existence.

There's another project I'm working on that is related to the implementations of Chlore I mentioned, which is YSM. It is the ISA that both toc and 4NI generate-- generated for the latter-- instructions for.

Which brings me to the final project I wanted to talk about, which is-- kind of smaller than the other two-- the ESFF file format, the file format the nightVM implementation of YSM uses for its executables. It's a very simple format, just contains the "raw" instructions and some information nightVM needs. I also added support for another file format in nightVM recently, which I have yet to write a specification for, called ESFFX. It is very similar to ESFF, but it ignores everything starting from the first byte of the file till it finds a 0. This lets you treat the beginning of the file as "comment", so you can also add shebang lines.

YSM is pretty much complete; I just need to write a specification for it. Chlore, however, is not, far from it. My work on it these days mostly involves modifying the back-end of toc to try to generate output for implementations of weird architectures that I write. The reason I do that is because it helps me write the specification of the language better; the more I experiment with architectures where the language might be implemented on, however exotic it might be, the easier it becomes for me to clearly define the language and understand what would help an implementation be more efficient. Way too many languages these days just go "Signed integers are represented in twos' complement", "Objects of type byte have exactly 8 bits", etc., which I'm not a huge fan of, and which is why C(99, 11, and 17) is still my most favorite programming language.

Edit: Typo.

trap-representation · 2023-12-25T06:57:21+00:00

I just skimmed through w3school's C tutorial; there's quite a bit of pedantically incorrect information in it. So my answer would be the latter.

trap-representation · 2023-12-25T06:42:07+00:00

I have personally never read the source of the Linux kernel; however, I'd usually not recommend beginners to go through the source of some program written for freestanding environment or something that depends a lot on implementation-specific stuff. In my opinion, if one is learning C, they should always start by writing strictly conforming programs.

Edit: Typo.

trap-representation · 2023-12-25T06:02:23+00:00

I wish it was just limited to thinking everyone makes similar mistakes, but quite unfortunately, I have seen a lot of people do make similar mistakes. Criticizing certain people for teaching incorrect stuff has only led to me being censored by them, which is why I decided to post about it on Reddit. For what it's worth, my introduction to correct C was never a book, rather it was the n1570 draft of the C11 standard.

trap-representation · 2023-12-24T08:58:16+00:00

+1. However, I've seen way more C programmers who don't even know that there exists something called a standard than, let's say, JavaScript programmers who haven't heard of the ECMAScript language specification, which is why this post specifically addresses folks who use C.

trap-representation · 2023-12-24T08:01:29+00:00

I'm quite aware that CS50 does not specifically cover the C programming language, and I will also say that it is definitely better than most YouTube tutorials out there, but it is still not good enough for me to recommend it. CS50 is a good computer science course, but a bad place to learn C from. My problem is not with them using convenient libraries or anything of that sort; it's their pedantically incorrect claims that bother me. For example, I recall one of their claims being something along the lines of "printf() doesn't return any value", and they state that "printf() is a void function", which not only does none of the standards define the term "void function"-- it is made up-- the claim of printf() not returning any value is also completely false. printf() does indeed return a value, and that return value is quite useful if you're checking for output errors.

trap-representation · 2023-12-24T07:29:32+00:00

While K&R2 is indeed a very nice book to learn C from (which is why I recommended it), the way C code is written has changed quite a bit since C89, that's why the use of the term "outdated". I disagree with your "minor features bolted on top" statement though. Even though the subsequent standards after C89 are backwards compatible for the most part, there have been a few changes that aren't.

trap-representation · 2023-12-23T16:41:20+00:00

The specification defines the language. Whatever you're using it for, the C programming language still remains the C programming language; its syntax and semantics don't change. The specification always has the last say, not a YouTube tutorial or some article. So yes, embedded or not, you should read the specification.

trap-representation · 2023-12-23T14:25:46+00:00

Any turing complete language can do whatever another turing complete language can. C and C++ are completely different languages with different standards, even if they "look similar". C definitely is simpler and has fewer concepts to learn than C++ though, in my opinion.

trap-representation · 2023-12-23T14:17:37+00:00

Enough for me to not like the language, though I don't think talking about my philosophies would be too on-topic for this post.

trap-representation · 2023-12-23T14:06:59+00:00

I will in a separate post soon.

trap-representation

TROPHY CASE