C: The Complete Meta-Nonsense

In article <>, Gareth Owen <> wrote:
> (Kenny McCormack) writes:
>
>> In article <>, Gareth Owen <> wrote:
>>>jacob navia <> writes:
>>>
>>>> For heathfield and Kiki, Spinoza1111 is a welcome partner.
>>>
>>>Please Jacob, rise above the silly name calling.
>>>I still want to believe you're above that level.
>>
>> Would all those who've referred to Mr. Nilges as "Spinny" please tender
>> their resignations from the high court now? Thank you.
>
>I am not one of them. Besides, I believe Jacob is better than that.
>I don't think that of those to whom you refer.

My point is that we all engage in name-calling here. It is what CLC is
all about. So, don't sweat it.

Kenny McCormack

In article <>, Gareth Owen <> wrote:
>Seebs <usenet-> writes:
>
>> but consider that if you just accept that he's clearly not reacting
>> rationally at any particular level, it is actually really funny.
>
>No. That's the point where its completely clear that its not funny.
>American Idol auditions aside, is "tease the mentally ill" really
>considered grown-up entertainment these days?

This is CLC. It's what we do.

Note that Seebs has publicly stated his own mental illness here, so he
is free to do it to others. Just like N's are allowed to use "the N
word"...

Kenny McCormack

On 2009-11-03, spinoza1111 <> wrote:
> Then Vax was arguably wrong.

Well, uhm. No. That's sort of the point.

Remember your rant about the guy who has to get started right now to keep
his job? He might not be on a DOS box.

You've offered thus far *zero* reasons for which writing the names in caps
can ever be of any benefit to the user, and you've just heard that, in the
real world, it screwed up at least one user.

> And why are we discussing out of date
> systems, and why is Richard Heathfield quoting Aho/Sethi et al (Dragon
> compiler book) 1986? Are we in a time warp?

You're the one obsessing over a 1995 book review.

> No they didn't. No intelligent programmer (there are very few)
> programs by moronically copying code snippets.

But someone trying to learn from a book is certainly likely to start
by naively (not moronically) copying in example code, assuming that
it'll work.

> Nothing really works,
> without change, for all platforms, and this isn't Herb's doing:

Again, many writers were able to make C books which did not run into these
problems. He's special.

> it's
> what vendors do to make money. Even if the code doesn't have to be
> changed for a particular target, anyone who expects not to have to
> probably change and in consequence doesn't do his homework, deserves
> what he gets.

Again, the entire point is that if Herb's book doesn't actually tell people
correctly how to use C, and other books do, then Herb's book sucks. The
more you talk, the more you establish that his book is crap; you're
blaming the victim at a revolutionary pace.

The hypocrisy is particularly stunning. If it's *your* expectation, failure
to comply with the expectation is a horrible thing. But if it's the fairly
reasonable expectation that code examples in a book which claims to cover
"standard C" will run on a variety of systems unless they specifically state
otherwise, then it's because people didn't do their homework...

>> Seebach correctly points out that using all caps may not always work.
>> One would think that information would be valuable.

> Yes, it is. Even more valuable would have been an explanation of the
> culture divide in computing between case insensitivity in IBM
> mainframes and subsequently PCs, and Vaxen and many other systems
> which were case-sensitive.

While that might make a great sidebar, the fact is that using names
that aren't in the canonical forms, and never mentioning that they won't
work, is indubitably worse than just using names in the correct forms.

> It's not Herb's fault that this difference exists. I do feel that for
> best results, he needed a co-author who was expert on non-Microsoft
> systems. But this lack was absolutely no reason for the campaign of
> abuse to which he was subjected.

There has been no campaign of abuse. Merely a properly evidenced and
supported claim that, for NO BENEFIT AT ALL, he did something in a way
that screws many readers, but does not improve the experience of any
readers. And we keep finding more and more of these examples.

>> This is *not* a trivial mistake. *We're not arguing over style, we're
>> not arguing over platform idiosyncracies. *This is basic **** that
>> Shildt gets *wrong*; any student who read this was grossly misinformed
>> on the semantics of arrays as function parameters.

> The **** is in the design of C.

Even if that's so, if the book can't describe it accurately, it's a pretty
shitty reference.

The world is full of things which have design flaws or historical quirks.
Good references correctly describe the thing they claim to be a reference
for. They might criticize it, too, but the first key step is to describe
it accurately.

> It's actually a bug in C

Again, even if we grant this (and you've shown no evidence for it), it's
the author's job to describe the language correctly.

> akin to the sprintf issue (sprintf
> intrinsically unsafe on all platforms).

Actually, it isn't. sprintf can be used unsafely, but... Let's come back
to this.

> As I have said, a professional

Might not be reading this book. He hasn't got time to mess around with
stuff that might be right most of the time. But what about hobbyists, who
also like to learn to program sometimes?

> doesn't accept the correctness of code in books any more than a
> mathematician expects all the statements in an elementary math
> textbook to be true in literal terms and given what we now know:
> explanations in calculus in particular can be wildly off-base.

I love that when it's an error in the book your venerate, a "professional"
ought to check his work. But when it's sprintf, the "professional"
mysteriously loses all obligation to expend any kind of cognitive effort
whatsoever.

But you'll be glad to know, the sprintf thing was fixed, in fact, in C99.
We now provide snprintf, which is safe.

> As a humanist and not an autistic twerp who worships abstractions and
> machines because he can't get laid, I think Schildt's peace of mind
> and reputation was MORE important than using a language in which it is
> (almost by design) insanely difficult to write correct code.

You may well be right, in which case, he shouldn't have written a book
about a language in which he was unable to write correct code. He should
have picked a better language and gone and written about that.

> The standards efforts had a chance to rectify this situation and they
> failed to owing to vendor greed.

You keep saying this, but keep not supporting it.

> Actually, they are. Seeback lists only twenty mistakes and says in "C:
> The Complete Nonsense" that these are the known errors.

Bullshit.

The following is a partial list of the errors I am aware of, sorted by
page number. I am not including everything; just many of them.

I am missing several hundred errors. Please write me if you think you
know of any I'm missing. Please also write if you believe one of these
corrections is inadequate or wrong; I'd love to see it.

The page unambiguously states that it is a partial list, and has done so for
over ten years.

> I today teach classes in *critical* reading of texts such as Joseph
> Conrad. You don't understand until you've found aporias and errors in
> a text so arguably Schildt does his readers an unintentional service
> with his errors, which as I have said, are fewer in number than
> claimed.

This is so awesome. If/when I redo the page, I am going to have to do a
ton of sidebars for your various awesome quotes.

> Furthermore, I see where you don't have the balls to post a fix to the
> strcat.

.... Uh. There are at least a dozen fixes, all utterly trivial.

Maybe we should leave fixing the errors to a first-year CS student or
something.

> The point is that C IS A JOKE especially in string handling.

It certainly isn't a string processing language, but it's actually pretty
easy to get right.

> As soon
> as any competent programmer starts using C (whether Bjarne Stroustrup
> in the 1970s or I in the early 1990s) he is appalled by it and starts
> using its macro and function facility to craft his own C.

Interesting assertion, but not especially supported.

> Stop blaming, and scapegoating, Schildt for your own poor taste in
> programming languages.

It sure is a shame that, in the 80s and 90s, marauding gangs of fanatic
lovers of bad programming language went around holding guns to peoples'
heads and forcing them to write books about substandard languages.

-s
--
Copyright 2009, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-
http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!

Seebs

On 2009-11-03, Gareth Owen <> wrote:
> Seebs <usenet-> writes:
>> but consider that if you just accept that he's clearly not reacting
>> rationally at any particular level, it is actually really funny.

> No. That's the point where its completely clear that its not funny.
> American Idol auditions aside, is "tease the mentally ill" really
> considered grown-up entertainment these days?

I sure hope so, because people do it to me all the time!

.... More seriously, you're probably right, I should just ignore the guy.
Exploring his madness is fascinating, but it doesn't seem likely to result
in any possible educational value about 80% of the time, and the remainder
doesn't seem much rewarding. About the best defense I can offer is that
he appears to be even less aware that fun is being had than he is of C.

-s
--
Copyright 2009, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-
http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!

Seebs

On 2009-11-03, Richard Heathfield <> wrote:
> In <slrnhevnfs.2br.usenet->, Seebs wrote:
>> But you'll be glad to know, the sprintf thing was fixed, in fact, in
>> C99. We now provide snprintf, which is safe.

> The sprintf thing wasn't broken. If used correctly, it's fine. Like
> any tool, it can be used incorrectly.

> The snprintf thing is safe if used correctly, just like sprintf. And,
> like any tool, snprintf can be used incorrectly (and unsafely).

Right you are. However, it's much EASIER to use snprintf safely, which
is why it's there. I mostly brought it up just because it precisely
disproves at least three of his claims about standardization...

-s
--
Copyright 2009, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-
http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!

Seebs

In article <>, Gareth Owen <> wrote:
> (Kenny McCormack) writes:
>
>> My point is that we all engage in name-calling here.
>
>No, we don't.

The sky is blue...

Kenny McCormack

On Nov 3, 12:27*pm, gaze...@shell.xmission.com (Kenny McCormack)
wrote:

> The sky is blue...

What name calling was that?

gwowen

In article <2281198a-4b83-4aac-9da5->,
gwowen <> wrote:
>On Nov 3, 12:27*pm, gaze...@shell.xmission.com (Kenny McCormack)
>wrote:
>
>> The sky is blue...
>
>What name calling was that?

You need to sit up straighter in your chair.
You'll catch more of what's going on around you that way.

Kenny McCormack

On Nov 3, 2:06*pm, gaze...@shell.xmission.com (Kenny McCormack) wrote:
> In article <2281198a-4b83-4aac-9da5-a0afa2202...@a31g2000yqn.googlegroups..com>,

> >What name calling was that?
>
> You need to sit up straighter in your chair.
> You'll catch more of what's going on around you that way.

"And answer came there none"

Nice try Han. Now back under the bridge.

gwowen

On Nov 2, 9:03*pm, spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:

[snip]

> Stop blaming, and scapegoating, Schildt for your own poor taste in
> programming languages.
>

WHY DO YOU CARE? What difference does it make to you what we think of
Schildt's books? Is he your BFF? Or are you Herb himself and
unwilling to face criticism directly?

Why are you going to such lengths to defend Herb's honor? What's in
it for you? Why don't you just put up a YouTube video of you
screaming "Leave Herb aloooooonnnnnneee!!!!!!!!!!" It'll be just as
effective as your efforts here.

John Bode