[Gllug] SIGSEGV error

[Nix]

On 1 Sep 2007, Richard Jones verbalised:

> On Sat, Sep 01, 2007 at 12:30:12AM +0100, Nix wrote:
>> But you can't consider the horrible argument promotion rubbish to be
>> *advantageous*, surely?
>
> You're talking about the promotion of char/short -> int in the absence
> of prototypes?

And float -> double.

>                 Yet another "gotcha" in a language which is long past
> its sell-by date.  C is a horrible language which programmers who are

Well, actually, while C has many horriblenesses this one can be largely
ignored if you write decent code (i.e. `prototype everything', which
itself is a nasty piece of repetition which better languages don't
have).

The true horriblenesses are the declarator syntax and the way that
`const', pointers, and arrays intersect when you have to deal with more
than one of them.

> interested in writing correct code quickly (rather than willy-waving
> about "performance") should avoid at all costs.

I dunno, if you have a decent library behind you (providing things like
proper dynamic string management, GC, symbol handling and so on) then C
is quite easy to write decent code in. Of course with a library of that
complexity the case could be made that you're hardly writing C any more
but something more like Lisp in C clothing :) and that the vast majority
of (especially proprietary) code-bashers don't use such libraries even
if they're available because learning about them is `too hard',
*sigh*...
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug