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by jpc0 434 days ago
Auto as it is now has been in C++ since C++11, thats more than a decade ago...

If your argument was C then sure thats a C23 feature (well the type inference type of auto ) and is reasonably new.

This is much more a reflection on youe professor than the language. C++11 was a fundamental change to the language, anyone teaching or using C++ in 2025 should have an understanding of how to to program well in a 14 year old version of said language...
1 comments
koakuma-chan 434 days ago
> Auto as it is now has been in C++ since C++11, thats more than a decade ago...

> anyone teaching or using C++ in 2025 should have an understanding of how to to program well in a 14 year old version of said language...

If the current year is 2025 then 14 years ago is 2011 which is not that long ago.

> If your argument was C then sure thats a C23 feature (well the type inference type of auto ) and is reasonably new.

Grandparent comment is arguing that Linux was written in C89 until a few days ago so decades old books on C aren't actually outdated.

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jpc0 433 days ago
Decades ols books in C most certainly is even useful in modern C++23 because you need to interact with other libraries written in C89.

When a lot of modern CS concepts wwre first discovered and studied in the 70s, there's no point arguing that old books are useless. Honestly there may be sections of old books that are useless but in the whole they are still useful.

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koakuma-chan 433 days ago
We're talking about learning C/C++ from scratch which makes no sense to do by using a decades old book because it wouldn't teach you any modern features. Also we're not talking about computer science.
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ryao 433 days ago
You do not need to know about modern features to write code in C. This is part of computer science.
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koakuma-chan 433 days ago
> You do not need to know about modern features to write code in C.

Then what’s the point of adding any new features?

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ryao 432 days ago
Some people want to use them, they are useful in some contexts and they often already exist in some form elsewhere, but the majority of people often do not need them.

That said, when you learn a foreign language, you do not learn every word in the dictionary and every grammatical structure. The same is true for programming. You just don't need to have a more up to date book than one on C89 to begin learning C.

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