[mbivert]

Well, there are such tools for C, but wouldn't using them be detrimental in this context? Think, like using a debugger vs. trying to wrap the execution in one's mind: I'not saying that one shouldn't use debuggers, but not using one has benefits, as a teaching device.

Like running in a weight vest.

Edit: ah, perhaps you meant, in addition to using raw C, one should also learn how to use such static analyzers & cie

[lifthrasiir]

> Edit: ah, perhaps you meant, in addition to using raw C, one should also learn how to use such static analyzers & cie

Exactly. Sorry for my unclear wording.

[quelsolaar]

As the author notes, to know what C code does you need to run it. A good debgger is a C programmers best friend.

[mbivert]

Not necessarily:

> A year or two after I'd joined the Labs, I [Rob Pike] was pair programming with Ken Thompson on an on-the-fly compiler for a little interactive graphics language designed by Gerard Holzmann. I was the faster typist, so I was at the keyboard and Ken was standing behind me as we programmed. We were working fast, and things broke, often visibly—it was a graphics language, after all. When something went wrong, I'd reflexively start to dig in to the problem, examining stack traces, sticking in print statements, invoking a debugger, and so on. But Ken would just stand and think, ignoring me and the code we'd just written. After a while I noticed a pattern: Ken would often understand the problem before I would, and would suddenly announce, "I know what's wrong." He was usually correct. I realized that Ken was building a mental model of the code and when something broke it was an error in the model. By thinking about how that problem could happen, he'd intuit where the model was wrong or where our code must not be satisfying the model.

[kazinator]

A debugger can only tell you what the executable does: the program compiled with a particular compiler on a particular platform, with particular code generation options.

It can tell you that i = i++ increased i by 2, for instance. That might not even be true of another instance of i = i++ in the same object file being debugged.

There is no substitute for knowing what the C will do before it is run.