[zedshaw]

That's basically the point of this chapter. It's getting people to think like a hacker and try to break the code in unintended ways. That makes them better programmers and helps when avoiding common mistakes in C code.

Using K&R to do this is to give people a set of known good C code samples and show how even those can be broken and misused.

[ori_b]

Noble goal, but the way the chapter is written doesn't really come across that way, in my opinion.

[aptwebapps]

Speaking as someone who doesn't know C, hasn't read K&R, but who (usually!) has decent reading comprehension, it _does_ come across this way.

He's completely explicit about what he's doing and why. I don't understand how people can read that and still feel that he's being unfair.

Maybe I'm just too literal-minded.

[ori_b]

Calling string manipulation functions buggy and broken because they fail when you don't pass them a string is both wrong and silly.

[bonzoesc]

How do you test that something in C is a string?

[tedunangst]

You don't, because you can't. That's basically the same as the beginner question, "How can you test if a pointer has been freed?"

[bonzoesc]

It was a rhetorical question. What's the sense in having functions that operate on "strings" if you can't figure out what a "string" is at runtime? It's much saner to have functions operate on "strings that are 80 characters or less" or "a structure containing a integer `length` and an array of `length` chars."

[ori_b]

The same way you test that a pointer is intialized to a valid value. You don't.