Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by spankyspangler 1866 days ago
Is this supposed to be a trick question? All do virtually the same thing at their core, differing in where they take their input from and whether they are the C11 bounds checking variants. You can add all the v prefix variants too, doesn't really make things more difficult.

You could have thrown in a bunch of functions from string(3), but even then... C string handling isn't great by any means, but it isn't vast or complicated either.
1 comments
whatshisface 1866 days ago
You can learn the C stdlib+system headers, but at that point you're doing something more or less equivalent to learning a high level language's features, and you're past the simplicity of K&R.
link
spankyspangler 1866 days ago
I'm not sure what you mean. C is a high level language. And yes it and standard library has obviously grown more complex than it was 50 years ago.

It's small and easy to grasp the entire thing though, unlike most other more modern high level languages.

That said, it's not entirely clear that matters too much. Almost any non-toy C project is going to be bringing in libraries outside libc, so you still need to go off and learn those if you want to work on a project. Doesn't really matter whether they're in the base language or not.

link
whatshisface 1866 days ago
I think the argument is converging on, "by the time you do anything useful with it, C is as complex as any other language, except for C++ which almost nothing is as complex as." That's more or less what everyone seems to agree on.
link
pjmlp 1866 days ago
Ready for a random question out of the 200+ UB cases on the ISO C, or about a random feature from any C compiler?
link
spankyspangler 1866 days ago
I'm not sure if you replied to the wrong comment or not because it doesn't address what I wrote.
link
pjmlp 1866 days ago
I surely replied to the right comment,

> It's small and easy to grasp the entire thing though, unlike most other more modern high level languages.

So ready for the question?

link
spankyspangler 1866 days ago
> I surely replied to the right comment,

Oh, well it didn't address what I wrote.

> So ready for the question?

Doesn't address what I wrote.

link