[clarry]

The point is that you don't learn all the ways in which things fail in C by trying. At best, you learn the way in which they fail (or fail to fail!) on your specific platform/compiler/version/compiler options combo.

If you want to know how things can fail (or, what things can fail in unspecified ways), you have to do a bit of reading and no amount of trying and experimenting will conjure that knowledge.

[zzzcpan]

There isn't a guide to learn how things fail on platform, compiler, version, options combo. Probably the only things that force you to systematically research and accumulate such knowledge is by writing a language VM in C or use C as an intermediate representation. Even writing a C compiler itself won't teach you that.

[clarry]

> There isn't a guide to learn how things fail on platform, compiler, version, options combo.

Yeah, that's the point. Chasing that knowledge is pointless. Instead, read the spec and find out what is legal and what is not. What is defined and what is not. Then you can stop worrying about how things fail and start worrying about not doing those things.

[ianai]

Trying c out with a known solid testing framework seems like a much more practical and useful way to start. Telling people to read a text wall before doing any practice at any task is a great setup for failure. Math doesn’t do that. Physics doesn’t do that. Chemistry doesn’t do that. Literature doesn’t do that. Philosophy doesn’t do that. Etc. and of those philosophy is almost the study of text walls. But the best philosophy courses tend to start with a Socratic dialogue which is basically live action philosophizing.

[kqr]

Well, we also have lots of historic evidence (nearly every application written in C ever) that traditional/intuitive teaching methods don't work for C.

All people have learned from the last 40 years of C is how to write ridiculously insecure applications.

Reading the standard may not be the optimal choice, or even the first choice, but common teaching methods are nearly guaranteed to produce crap results in the specific case of C programming.

[MaxBarraclough]

I broadly agree. More so than any other other language, you cannot produce a good C (or C++) programmer by try-it-and-see alone. It's vital to have a grasp of the way the language is defined.

Point of disagreement: no amount of C expertise makes a hand-written C codebase safe. Vulnerabilities and undefined behaviour are often found even in code written by top-flight C programmers.