[Sussex] Re: C programming help

[Captain Redbeard]

>Thomas Adam wrote:
>
>This demonstrates a severe lack of understanding.  "Hacking" it in this
>way is not going to help you in the long run.

Probably true, but I don't know any other way of doing it.  I am not a trained programmed, I don't know
any trained programmers, books only go so far and I don't currently have the resources to train
professionally, so other than "hacking it" I don't see any other way of learning it.  True, designing
and debugging "on the fly" as I am doing is not a very good way of writing software but I know a lot
more about C today than I did five days ago and my code, messy as it may be, is a damn site cleaner than
what I had last week.  Once I "hack" something together that actually works, no matter how crude it may
be, at least I will have something, THEN I can work on a cleaner interface, better design, more robust
code, etc.  At the moment I am at the stage where I don't know that I don't know, but by putting together
something that *should* work, per my understanding, only to find out that it doesn't, though it may not
be the best way, is still a valid way of learning.  Sure, so I spent two hours swearing at my monitor
because my program crashed randomly when I tried to run it, only to discover (duh!) that I hadn't thought
of setting each element in an array of structures to NULL before using the array but (a) the techniques
I used to discover that will be useful to me in future now that I know how to look for this kind of error
and (b) I won't be making that particular error again.  Inefficient yes, but I don't know any other way
of doing so short of a professional course and right now, as much as I would kill for the opportunity, I
won't be doing one.

Of course, if you do know a better way, ignore everything I've just said and tell me about it :)




Captain Redbeard.



====================================================
Being as I am, a relatively politically-aware kind
of guy, I am always ready to inform myself, as any
True Citizen should be, of what is happening in this
small world of ours, what threats there are to our
livelihood and well-being and what we must face up to
if we are to protect our freedom and civil liberties
that make this civilisation a pleasure to be a part
of.  In this wise I logged on, as any True Citizen
should, to http://www.conspiracy.com/ to find out
what is really going on in this world of ours.  And
what do you think I was first confronted with when
the home page came up? 

   www.businesslink.gov.uk/

Now I AM informed!
====================================================