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Re: programming



* dman (dsh8290@rit.edu) spake thusly:
> On Mon, Nov 05, 2001 at 01:17:15PM -0600, Dimitri Maziuk wrote:
> | * J.A.Serralheiro (mrserra@ci.uc.pt) spake thusly:
> | > so, there is no way to know in advance the length of a string unless you
> | > have an identifier, or constant for it. 
> | 
> | Que? You can't know $FOO of $BAR until you take $BAR in and see what
> | sort of $FOO it has. You can't know the length of a string until you 
> | read it in and count the characters.
> 
> Right, but if you don't know ahead of time that the sequence of
> characters is NUL terminated, how do you know when to stop counting
> characters?

This is purely hypothetical: if you're scanf()'ing in in, 
the length is <= BUFSIZE, as I pointed out before. Only way
you can get a char array of unknown size is when an external
app passes you a non null-terminated char* without giving you
its size. Obviously, whoever writes programs like that should
be taken out and shot, this really has nothing to do with C
(or any other language for that matter).

> | Shroedinger's Cat (there is no "string" in C, BTW)
> 
> That's a large part of the problem, IMO.
> 
> This discussion supports a quote that I like :
>     "Don't use C;  In my opinion,  C is a library programming language
>      not an app programming language."  - Owen Taylor (GTK+ developer)
>
> C is great of low-level, close-to-the-metal, sort of programming like
> kernels, device drivers, and interpreters.  However for application
> development, where high-level data structures, logic, and interactions
> are common a higher level language is much more appropriate and is
> likely to reduce development effeort required.

Yeah, yeah. When you try to write a bloated monstrosity like 
e.g. gnome in C, you find out there's a lot of development
effort required, sure. So use Java, it has built-in facilities 
for writing slow and bloated code.

Dima
-- 
"Mirrors and copulation are abominable because they increase the number of 
entities."                                        -- corollary to Occam's Razor



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