Is C a 'good' programming language?

[Zippy]

Stone me, I've got that Computer Graphics by Foley, van Dam, Feiner & Hughes.

Never been opened...

I bought it for £3 remaindered in WHS.

I've also got one about CG in FORTRAN. Somewhere...

Ahem. One of my most treasured books (second edition). I read mine though

[Churchill]

Not that difficult in a text-mode display. No idea about embedded devices but back in my days of MS-Dos coding in C, I remember Bios functionality to interact with files, display, etc. Didn't you fire interrupts to access this functionality? Been a while...

BIOS? We're not talking about PCs.

MOV AX,4c00h
INT 21h

[Churchill]

Used C some years ago for programming basic control system. I didn't dislike it but had to get my head round it quickly so we were natural enemies.

Complete sod to work out what was going on if it went wrong - compile OK, run OK, die on its arse a few minutes later. Grr (or possibly kaboom).

I think it toughened me up a bit and I'm sure I understood a lot more about programming and microprocessors then. Really miss it actually

Not a crap language - iz tools for the job innit?

/* Churchill's favourite piece of C code */
int (*ptr2func)() = NULL;


Churchill - In "Blessed are the Geeks" mode!

[d000hg]

BIOS? We're not talking about PCs.

MOV AX,4c00h
INT 21h

Same difference, smartarse.

[VectraMan]

/* Churchill's favourite piece of C code */
int (*ptr2func)() = NULL;

It's not proper C unless you do your variable assignments in the middle of an expression:

while((c = fgetc(fp))!=EOF){

Why did anybody ever think that was a good idea?

[Churchill]

Same difference, smartarse.

I was giving an example of the usage of bios functions. Without a BIOS you could try the following...

mov si, 0115
mov di, 140
mov ax, b800
mov es, ax
mov ah, 07
mov cx, 13
lodsb
stosw
loop 110
ret
db 'd000hg blows goats!'

[d000hg]

Typical arrogant geek. Can't have a technical conversation without feeling obliged to prove his superiority. You walking stereotype, you.

[Churchill]

Typical arrogant geek. Can't have a technical conversation without feeling obliged to prove his superiority. You walking stereotype, you.

You were the first to try and show superiority. You made an assumption and failed.

[NickFitz]

Not that difficult in a text-mode display. No idea about embedded devices but back in my days of MS-Dos coding in C, I remember Bios functionality to interact with files, display, etc. Didn't you fire interrupts to access this functionality? Been a while...

The BIOS didn't include any functionality for handling files. It had low-level disk handling routines for reading and writing sectors and so on. Support for files was supplied by, oddly enough, the file system - for example, MS-DOS.

The BIOS routines were very handy for wandering through the File Allocation Table patching back together accidentally deleted files

[RichardCranium]

Not to mention the style war over the positioning of the "{"...

I had managed to forget about that. Endless office arguments about what the in-house standard should be, after work was already well under way in converting an entire system from Pascal to C.

It only became apparent we were working to three different standards when the first bit of maintenance work was needed.

What an abortion.

"Lining them up vertically is a waste of listing paper"

"But you follow the code more easily"

"Not when it is too long because of all the lines containing just one character"

Boss: "Doesn't that make the source code bigger? That'll slow down compilations, reduce productivity and require additional storage and that costs money. Both { and } should only occur on lines with actual code in future."

"What does K&R do?"

"Well sometimes this and sometimes that. Sometimes both in the same example."

"But that still doesn't tell me how to indent else if"

"Like this"

"Why aren't you indenting by 4 characters like we used to?"

"I changed BRIEF to use only three so the code lines up better under ifs"

"But I've been using two because otherwise the code goes off the right hand side of the screen"

"Eh? I thought you were using 8? You've been using bloody vari-tabs again, haven't you?"

"Well they only need one character in the source code and the editor displays them as 2, 3 or 4 as you want. You just never indent using space, that's all."

"Yes, but only you and your farking mentalist use of Wordstar 3 as an editor supports that functionality, you git."

"At least it's not called BRIEF, FFS."

And so on...

I thought alcohol had successfully wiped those memory cells long, long ago.