[Pyrex] C

[John J Lee]

On Tue, 24 Jun 2003, Gerrit Holl wrote:
[...]
> David McNab wrote:
[...]
> > If you're a programmer, you will always suffer a sense of helplessness
> > and disempowerment until you gain understanding and mastery of C-level
> > code.
[...]
> Hm...

He's right.


[...]
> It feels as a lot of effort to perform little work.

That's life.  Be (very) thankful you're not learning C++.


[...]
> I did once try to work through 'The C Programming Language' a few years ago.
> However, I got stuck at the exercises at the end of the first chapter. They are
> very difficult. Perhaps I shouldn't want to complete all exercises before I
> continue.
[...]

Exs. 1-23 and 1-24 look somewhat tricky intrinsically, not just because
you're doing it in C, so I wouldn't flog myself too much over them.  Or
try writing them in Python first, then porting to C -- you don't lose
points for that.  But in general, I think examples like these at the end
of a first chapter in a programming language book are always going to be
hard, simply because you've only been taught a little about the language
by the time you've got that far.


> > In conclusion - don't be a victim. You owe it to yourself to know this
> > language - even if you don't end up programming in it, just knowing it
> > will get you out of no end of scrapes and put you on a much more secure
> > foundation as a programmer.
>
> At the moment, Python is the only language I know. I will try to learn
> C this summer, even if it's 90% read-only. It can't be bad to do so...

I think the fastest way to *fully* learning C read-only is to learn to
*write* C.  If you only want to 'just about' be able to read C, that'll
only take you a day or two.  The devil is in the detail, and the only way
to learn that is to write programs (not necessarily big programs -- though
that will undoubtedly teach you more).  Explore 'info libc', and don't
forget about the existence of malloc & friends.  Try using a few modern C
libraries -- some are quite object-oriented, and surprisingly easy to use.


John