Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

7 of 400 comments (clear)

  1. Did you consider.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...going to another publisher?

    I used to be a development editor (10-15 years ago) - a real one; i.e. a software developer recruited to improve developer-level books, not a editor carrying the title. I would have been interested in providing up-front assistance to you and helping you get it ready for someone else. Most of the non-textbook (IDG, Que, SAMS, etc.) publishers prefer to have things come in chapter-by-chapter so things can be directed along the way, but with feedback prior to submittal, you could have gotten around that. You could have made some money that way.

  2. You don't need new standards by GamblerZG · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What you really need is a new language.

    Before modding me down, think about it. Any programming language is about solving problems, and problems you solve today are different from the ones someone had back in the days of C creation. Moreover, the ways you deal with programming changed as well. IT industry needs new languages, including low-level and compiled ones.

    1. Re:You don't need new standards by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Agreed, we need a new language. All this writing applications in C is no good. Just think about all the security flaws that could have been avoided if we used a language in which buffer overruns, format strings, pointer arithmetic, unsafe casts, and memory leaks just didn't exist.

      C also suffers from lack of flexibility. Try implementing a Java-style class system in C; although you can make something that works the same, using it will always be more cumbersome. Because of this, C will always be pretty low-level, it is just not adaptable enough to be used for really high-level things.

      On the other hand, C isn't ideal for low-level programming either. Try writing properly tail recursive functions in C, or try composing a function call. Or, do something with the registers in your CPU.

      And then there's the syntax of the language. Try writing a parser that can correctly parse any valid C program. Or try to write a program that does transformations on C programs, both reading and writing C code.

      --
      Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
    2. Re:You don't need new standards by dasunt · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Before modding me down, think about it. Any programming language is about solving problems, and problems you solve today are different from the ones someone had back in the days of C creation. Moreover, the ways you deal with programming changed as well. IT industry needs new languages, including low-level and compiled ones.

      I thought about it.

      You first declared that we need a new language based on the assumption that we are solving different problems from a decade ago. (C99 was released about that long ago, and GCC supports much of the C99 spec).

      Yet, thinking about it, you didn't tell us how problems are different from a decade ago.

      Nor did you tell us how these problems present difficulties in the upcoming C0X spec.

      The amazing thing about C is that it has survived several 'languages of the year'. It obviously has some advantages. It seems to me that C is a proven tool in the programmer's workshop. It doesn't solve all problems, but no tool does. However, it solves a lot of problems very well.

  3. Pretty Damn Impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've only been skimming it for a little bit now, but this book seems extremely interesting.

    It probably would have gotten a lot more love during editing by the publisher, as, IMHO, it's fairly difficult to approach and digest in its current form. Maybe I just don't get it yet, but it does seem to suffer a bit due to its organization.

    That said, the information in here is absolutely enthralling. I went over a few of the more subtle parts of the standard that I know fairly well, and I was impressed. The explanations are good, but what I really find compelling are the examples, historical anecdotes, references to different machines and architectures, and juxtapositions with other languages. You can tell that this guy knows this stuff, but more importantly, he's *lived* it.

    The comments about this book not being useful to a "good C programmer" completely miss the mark. A good C programmer -- one that has a true love for programming -- will most likely find this book captivating.

  4. Manifestation of liturgical commentary. by blackest+sun · · Score: 4, Interesting

    At a glance, this is impressive not so much for content as for format. In essence this book is a Talmudic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud breakdown of interpretation.

  5. Why Addison-Wesley rejected this by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting
    It's clear why Addison-Wesley rejected this. The author is a terrible writer. He has a fondness for run-on sentences, fails to use commas appropriately, and makes several grammatical mistakes per page.

    I'm up to page 132, and so far, it's an introductory cognitive psychology text. A bad one.

    There are 1616 pages of this drivel. Even for someone interested in programming language design, this is a painful read.

    There's room for a good book in this area, but this isn't it. A more useful approach might be to start from Amit Yoran's statement that "About 95% of software bugs come from 19 common, well-understood" programming mistakes", and evaluate language designs against that.