OT: Programming in C

[Bill Davidsen]

Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-04-08 at 15:27 -0400, Steven W. Orr wrote:
>> On Tuesday, Apr 8th 2008 at 13:39 -0000, quoth Les:
>>
>> =>On Tue, 2008-04-08 at 09:39 -0600, Robin Laing wrote:
>> =>> max bianco wrote:
>> =>> > I want to learn C and I know there are quite a few programmers on this
>> =>> > list.  I am looking for a couple of good books on learning C. I am not
>> =>> > exactly a beginner but I am no expert and i would like to start going
>> =>> > over everything from scratch. 
>>
>> One thing I've noticed over the years is that the majority of C coders out 
>> there, no matter how good they are, never really master the ability to 
>> composed and decompose complex declarations and references. I don't say 
>> this in a perjorative fashion, but I see it a lot and it's important to be 
>> able to distinguish between an array of pointers to integers and a pointer 
>> to an array of integers, i.e.,
>>
>> int *foo[10];
>> int (*foo)[10];
>>
>> Going through K&R is standard, but this is a basic complaint I've had for 
>> a long time.
> 
> This comment reminded me of the fabulously useful little utility cdecl
> (and its cousin c++decl) which translates between the English
> description of a declaration in C (resp. C++) and the actual C (resp.
> C++) code itself.
> 
> So I went to try them and discovered they weren't installed.
> 
> So I went to install them and discovered that they are no longer in the
> repository.
> 
> That's a shame.  Anyone know why they were dropped?

I found six places to D/L the "source" for cdecl, none of which will 
compile on FC6 or FC8. I am going to try the sources from RH9 as soon as 
I pull them off an old CD, if that doesn't work I will beat on the 
sources I have, which I'm sure can be gotten working with minimal 
effort, although they are all 1996 or 2001 versions.

If someone else finds a copy which compiles out of the box, let me know, 
I can't seem to find the old Fedora source archives where my bookmark 
leads me.


-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot