any C lover here?

[Fei Ng]

what is your background?? from C? like C? hate it?

[Marcus Green]

C is a programming language with all the power of Assembler with all the ease of use and readability of Assembler.
Marcus
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[This message has been edited by Marcus Green (edited December 14, 2001).]

[Frank Carver]

Except that through the power of compilation and linking, it can produce programs which need much more space and memory than the same in assembler.

[Badriprasad Bumbabol]

I hate it cos I used to be really bad in C in University and so I cudnt impress as many girls as the geek-next-door or rather geek-on-the-next-PC. Damn. Even my girlfriend used to go to him for questions about C.And Unfortunately, he was my best friend and so I cudnt kill him or something. Those days were good. College rivarly and stuff.

[Michael Ernest]

Oh, listen to you Nancy boys. C is certainly not much fun to read if it's been banged out by a frenzied cube drone, but you'd better not hear that from anyone who professes to love Perl.
As with any powerful language, you're certainly quite free in C to create some abominable stuff. You're also free to create some very fast, powerful stuff. I'm teaching a systems programming class on Solaris this week, as a matter of fact, and I have a tagline I use throughout the course. "Total control imples total responsibility." C gives you close to total control, as least in a Unix environment; if you take that power lightly, you reap what you sow.

[David Weitzman]

I ought to know better than to respond to another one of these, but I will anyway. I used to think C was just a stupid, powerful, overly-popular language. Then I learned some assembler and realized what C really is. I think that put things in perspective and gave me a respect for C programmers and interest in the language and its capabilities/limitations. It is in no way as unreadable as assembler, but I don't want to argue with Marcus anymore because he doesn't appear to have any insights into functional programming languages beyond the fact that they aren't Java. C is as low level and powerful as you can get without sacrificing portability, yet it doesn't feel low level. It has sytax conveniently similar to what most of us are used to, but some leniency that could keep a less experienced C programmer busy debugging. The C libraries are a little weird, but I suppose after a while you get used to it.

Except that through the power of compilation and linking, it can produce programs which need much more space and memory than the same in assembler.

Except that the code is shorter, clearer, and more portable. Since nobody can actually be expected to write something powerful in assembler, C has an important place in the field of performance-oriented programming.

[David Weitzman]

Michael, why do you dislike perl but like C? They are both powerful functional languages (perl supports objects, but to prevent discussing the unique implementation I'll pretend it doesn't) that can be obfuscated amazingly well or used to make amazingly powerful and cool programs.

[Gregg Bolinger]

Originally posted by David Garland:
I think that put things in perspective and gave me a respect for C programmers...

Be very careful with whom you are giving your respect to in terms of C Programmers. Most C programmers don't really know the Assembly Language. And I'll bet that Microsoft is full of them the way they pump out memory hogging code all the time.
I think that people who don't like C are ignorant. And I say that in the definition of the word. You don't have to love the language, but you should always respect it. It is not an easy language to master. I started learning it a while back, and I have reverted back to the Assembly language, which I had taken a course on in College and the Instructor was horrible so I didn't learn it like I should have, and it is like a religous experience. My eyes are beginning to open and C all the possiblities. Pun Intended.
Too bad the same can't be said with some of the other more popular languages (debatable) that people claim to "LOVE" I.E. MFC, Visual Basic, etc.

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Happy Coding,
Gregg Bolinger

[Michael Ernest]

It's not that I really dislike Perl, but the user base I seem to come to into contact with leaves a lot to be desired. By and large, these are people who have endless energy for solving any problem with a script, don't like commenting their code, and often mistake the fewest lines of code for the most powerful code one can write.
Perl has a lot of strengths, and I'm not blind to them. But I see a lot more energy invested in using Perl (and only Perl) for whatever than an objective application of its merits. When the coolness of the tool outweighs the scope of what's being accomplished...well, let's just say I've seen plenty of C projects that are *expensive* and difficult to maintain for precisely that reason.

[Daniel Dunleavy]

Well way back in the 80s there wasn't much to choose from. So when C on the PC came a long, I was eager to leave MASM behind. But whenever I would go to performance seminars they would say develop it in C, and rewrite in asm those parts which were heavily used.
Dan

[Ashik Uzzaman]

I liked C but did not worked too much accept some initial logic practice... ...i think its !

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Muhammad Ashikuzzaman (Fahim)
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java� 2 Platform
--When you learn something, learn it by heart!

[Marcus Green]

Programming languages should be seen in historical context. When the C programming language
was created it offered two major benefits, it was at a higher level of abstraction than assembler and it was portable. The main alternatives at the time were languages such as Cobol and Fortran. Cobol was designed for business processing and is not suitable for system level programming and Fortran is mainly a scientific language (Formula Translation). The C language filled the gap as a general language between these relativly specialised languages and the bit twiddling level of Assembler.
Because of the modest performance of hardware at the time C became popular because you could write portable code that gave good performance. On the downside it suffered from being a nuclear buzzsaw that would allow you to shoot yourself in the foot, and that of anyone standing within 20 meters with great ease. Of course if you really knew your stuff then you wouldn't do this, but the world is full of people who don't quite know their stuff. When first started working on PC's the platform of choice seemed to be a combination of dbase and C. This allowed you to get acceptable performance on a 4.77 Mhz pc with 256K (kilobytes not megabytes) of RAM.
When I first started playing with Java I had a 4Mb 386 33Mhz. The performance was very dissapointing. Today a combination of optimisation of the JVM and the cheap availability of 1GHZ machines with 500Mb of RAM Java gives acceptable performance with ease and power for the programmer.
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