I learned C in the mid nineties using a copy of Visual C++ 1.0 that a friend had gotten from his father (and probably he got it from work). It was the only compiler I knew of and once I was ready to move beyond toy programs, I was seriously hampered by the fact that this compiler couldn't produce text mode executables (any call to printf opened its own new window that definitely wasn't cmd.exe) and it couldn't set the graphics mode for blitting pixels. It was heavily oriented around this new fangled MFC thing but I was a teenager so I wanted to program games not business apps or whatever. That meant I wanted text mode or graphics mode.
My high school CS class had Borland C++ and I could set mode 0x13 with that in DOS. But I had no way of obtaining this compiler as a kid. And it probably didn't work on Windows 95 anyway.
Anyways, it wasn't until the early 2000s that I finally learned about GCC, a free as in beer and freedom compiler and the simplicity of it would have been amazing for learning.. If only I had known.
Funny thing I still use win10.
> Note that C does not have a boolean type
`_Bool` and `long long` are both introduced in C99, this is mixed up info.
Edit: probably tailor-made for old MSVC, which didn't support _Bool until VS2013.
When somebody says "This program is written in C", my initial thought is "Which C?". There is no one, single C.
I don't write C daily. Heck, I don't write it monthly any more. And so my grey cells are struggling with which versions introduced what, and you've spotted something I would have missed on a first read.
And this is a problem.
Can you list all the undefined behaviours, and which language features came into which version across ANSI, C99, C11, C17 and C23? The last one feels a little brighter in my mind, but I definitely can't, and if I was writing a C tutorial - like many that have been written - I'd probably be explicit about choosing a version and sticking with it, and good luck and godspeed to everything outside that version.
Of course this is one of the reasons learning C is harder than other languages, and why languages like Zig and Odin have a decent chance: ergonomically simpler than Rust, all the power and flexibility, (much) less of the head scratching.
I think the jury is out on Zig and Odin (but I like Zig a lot, in particular), but I feel Rust has hit a tipping point - like Go, Python and Java - where there's too much production code out there for it to disappear in the next ten years.
If you were to ask me about languages where that might not be the case in ten years, I'd point to where usage is not very production oriented (R, Julia), or where people have had a good try and decided they want to pull back investment (anecdotally, Ruby and Scala seem to be on that curve right now).
Modern languages - even those that have high levels of C interop like Zig - can (and do) avoid those problems.
The younger generations totally sideline C completely.
Myself a non-coder but experienced SysAdmin who can write cool Perl, TCL scripts, C almost feels almost natural when reading it. I just haven't had the time available to dive in.
It could be that I was exposed to it at 14 (2003) but chose perl because MSN/Y!M/AOL messenger bots were the discord bots of today. Still, eager to dive in. Some reason Java too.
On the Array Page:
/* print the 7th number from the array, which has an index of 6 */
printf("The 7th number in the array is %d", numbers[6]);
There is no mention of what %d is or does. Once you know, it's fine, it's the display placeholder for the variable but that's what throws me off on tutorials.
Moral of the story: books are better for learning when it comes to C.
orionblastar•7h ago