Shudder

Tue Jun 27 2023 10:57:46 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

 people are working on Go now.

so no one likes # for a comment then i guess?

( as odd as this sounds, this is part of implementing FORTH in Python, which of course its core is written in C..... )

def getWord (prompt="... ") :

    global words

    while not words : 

        try    : lin = raw_input(prompt)+"\n"

        except : return None

        if lin[0:1] == "@" : lin = open(lin[1:-1]).read()

        tokenizeWords(lin)

    word = words[0]

    words = words[1:]

    return word

def tokenizeWords(s) :

    global words                                          # clip comments, split to list of words

    words += re.sub("#.*\n","\n",s+"\n").lower().split()  # Use "#" for comment to end of line

it should.

There is my formal request to whomever is maintaining C to add it. 

:) 

Thu Jul 13 2023 09:30:19 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

I very much like '#' as a comment. But we're talking about C, which doesn't use it.

Ok, here's a great example of the kind of programming style that drives me batshit crazy.

// b_putroom()  -  back end to putroom() and b_deleteroom()
// (if the supplied buffer is NULL, delete the room record)
void b_putroom(struct ctdlroom *qrbuf, char *room_name) {
        char lowercase_name[ROOMNAMELEN];
        char *aptr, *bptr;
        long len;

        aptr = room_name;
        bptr = lowercase_name;
        while (!IsEmptyStr(aptr)) {
                *bptr = tolower(*aptr);
                aptr++;
                bptr++;
        }
        *bptr='\0';

        len = bptr - lowercase_name;
        if (qrbuf == NULL) {
                cdb_delete(CDB_ROOMS, lowercase_name, len);
        }
        else {
                time(&qrbuf->QRmtime);
                cdb_store(CDB_ROOMS, lowercase_name, len, qrbuf, sizeof(struct ctdlroom));
        }
}

What does it do?  Well, if you read through it for a while, you eventually figure out that we're generating a key to store an item in a database, using the item's name converted to lower case as the database key.  This is of course so that the item can be located in the database regardless of whether the user enters it in upper case, lower case, or mixed case.

Is it readable?  Not very easily.  Why is there pointer arithmetic here?  I know who wrote this -- and if he ever reads this message, dude: your time is worth more than the computer's time -- and his intention was to shave off as many CPU cycles as possible.  On an operation that only runs once in a while, on data objects less than 64 bytes long.

Now, I do realize that in my old days I did really inefficient things like

for (i=0; i<strlen(str); ++i) {
    do_something;
}

And yes, that made it call strlen() on every iteration, which was bad.  But I've since moved on to:

len = strlen(str);
for (i=0; i<len; ++i) {
    do_something;
}

That makes the code completely readable and obvious, at the expense of one call to strlen().

The moral of this story is: if you're doing pointer arithmetic, you'd better be doing something really hard.

In this day and age, understanding is more important than getting the n-th degree of efficiency . Its not 1978 anymore. We have resources to spare for the sake of supportability after you leave, or even want to look at your own code in 5 years.

( well unless you are doing embedded work, but even that is far more generous in resources these days )

Fri Jul 14 2023 08:18:11 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

That makes the code completely readable and obvious, at the expense of one call to strlen().

 

Microcode for the win!  Everything else are just layers on top of that.

Once upon a time i could think in microcode, and moving bits around inside the CPU.  Not anymore.. been too long. I guess i could get a FPGA out of the closet and start again where i left off in the 80s.     Nah, no interest or energy. 

Sat Jul 15 2023 12:12:31 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Dude, why didn't you just write it in assembly?

i did embedded stuff for a while late 80s early 90s ( monitors, controllers, auto plant ) mostly on 8031's.  Assembler, no fancy high level stuff.  ( did write a forth for it, for my own amusement but never used it out in the plants )

Still have one of the boards from back then.  I used to 'cheat' to save board space and piggybacked the ram/eprom. 

Ya that's legal, but unfurtunately it incurs the cost of a memcpy.

Mon Aug 21 2023 11:15:15 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

All right, fellow nerds ... I've been writing in C for almost 40 years and apparently something changed when I wasn't looking. Someone please tell me when this became legal:

struct qux {
char foo[12345];
char bar[12345];
int baz;
};

struct qux myFunc(void) {

struct qux q;
strcpy(q.foo, "xxx");
strcpy(q.bar, "yyy");
q.baz = 3;
return(q);
}

For decades I have been laboring under the assumption that a function can only return types small enough to fit on a register; that is, in the case of a struct, you have to return a pointer to a struct, not the struct itself.
But now, I just tested the above, and it f***ing WORKED. And as far as I can tell from a web search, it's legal?!?

Assignment also seems to work; for example, myFunc() can end with

struct qux r;
r = q;
return(r);

I tested that and it worked too. When did that become legal?!? Also, I need to know, is this something that is now legal in the C language, or is it a hack that only works on GCC (like nested functions) ?

If this is legal, I've got a big pile of code that I can simplify. But only if it'll remain portable.

bool isEven(int val) { return (1 & val) == 0; }

bool is Odd(int val) { return !isEven(val); }