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The New C Standard

Posted by Zonk on from the meet-the-new-boss dept.

derek_farn writes "At a very late stage Addison Wesley decided not to publish my book, 'The New C Standard: An economic and cultural commentary'. Now that the copyright issues have been sorted out I am making the pdf freely available. You can download the pdf (mirror 1). The organization is rather unusual in that the commentary covers each sentence of the C Standard (actually the latest draft of C0X, excluding library) one by one (all 2022 of them). One major new angle is using the results from studies in cognitive psychology to try and figure out how developers comprehend code. The aim being to try and produce some coding guidelines that reduce costs (ie, reduce the time needed and bugs created). The book also contains the results of lots of measurements (over 400 figures and tables) in an attempt to back the arguments being made -- another unusual feature since most software related books don't publish any figures to back up what they say. Other subsections discuss common implementations and differences between the latest draft standard and C90/C++. More background on the project is available from the Inquirer.

2 of 400 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why would you use this? by dorkygeek · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Just because you don't know how to program Java, you don't have to blame others for using Java.

    --
    Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
  2. Warning to UK Readers! by Hal_Porter · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    There is a picture of Margret Thatcher on page 105.

    If you grew up in the UK in the Thatcher era, between 1979 and 1990, your brain may have a vulnerability that causes it to crash when exposed to these kinds of images.

    At time of writing, no patch is a available.

    The following workarounds are available.

    1) Do not download the pdf file. If you have already downloaded it, delete it without opening it.
    2) Print the PDF file, and ask someone born after 1990 or before 1940 to sort through the printout, find page 105 and destroy it. If they have read about the Thatcer era or lived through it, they should destroy the page *without looking at it*, by placing the printout face down and counting through to page 105.
    3) Disable image display in your pdf file reader, or use a pdf reader which does not support images.
    4) View the pdf in a hex editor.

    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;