[GuB-42]

You write your own parser.

Seriously, I don't use scanf that much in C. Most of the times, it doesn't do exactly what I want, or there is a more specialized alternative (ex: strtol). Also, generally, %s is bad, even the "safe" variant. For sscanf, it makes a copy, which is inefficient (if you are writing C, you want efficient code, right?) and you have to know the size in advance, and usually, you don't.

Most of my string manipulation in C involves loops, pointers and a lot of in-place manipulation. It is tedious compared to other languages but it is very efficient, the reason I picked C in the first place.

[whatshisface]

So in the context of the larger debate, this answer falls in to the "C is simple, until you try to use it, at which point you start writing your own programming language in C to write your application in," category. In this perspective C is simple mainly because it's missing the already-written code that you have to benefit you in other languages.

[lal]

I don't think any of this is close to fair. "C is simple" and "it takes some work to do stuff in C sometimes" aren't mutually exclusive, in fact the former necessarily implies the latter. C is simple, which means it doesn't have a pre-written obscure built-in or convoluted syntax to handle every possible thing you might want to do in the language. You're going to have to write some of the code in your project yourself. That doesn't mean C isn't simple. I don't think I have to get into why writing a string-parsing function isn't quite the same thing as writing your own programming language.

And C has libraries too, to be fair. So if you prefer the "choose between 25 competing libraries that all provide the desired functionality but half of them are deprecated or don't work" workflow a lot of people are used to from C++ or whatever you can do that. Lots of people use libraries in C. In fact, as you might be aware, your OS's package manager doubles as the C language's third-party package manager. There has been plenty of "already-written C code," because it's a language that has been ubiquitous in computing for fifty years.

I'm not sure where these same tired critiques bubble up from but I see them constantly and they don't make sense. There are a number of entirely valid and damning critiques to be made of the C ecosystem but "there aren't any libraries written in C" and "oh, so you say C is simple, huh? Have you tried using it?!" aren't among them.

You're not going to be a 20 year veteran C developer and then suddenly just today learn about some obscure built-in, and that's what is meant by "simple" here, and that's a good thing.

[whatshisface]

>You're not going to be a 20 year veteran C developer and then suddenly just today learn about some obscure built-in, and that's what is meant by "simple" here, and that's a good thing.

But you could suddenly learn about a new library feature that performs the same function as another language's builtin, which is for all practical purposes an equivalent experience. In both cases you see an unfamiliar string of characters in someone else's code, and then look up what it does.

[lal]

someone else on the internet writing a function does not make the c programming language more complicated. c's (lack of) library namespacing, which is responsible for this confusion, is, frankly, one of those valid critiques, but this is gibberish.