howard@cyb-eng.UUCP (Howard Johnson) (07/17/85)
<11457@brl-tgr.ARPA>: >> Let's say I am a person whose programming experience consisted a few >> high school and college courses in Basic & Pascal. Ok, now let's say I >> have a problem that I want solved by a programmer. The programmer comes >> back to me with a program which doesn't do quite what I wanted. ... >> I'm lost, the programmer doesn't know what's wrong, and we're stuck. >> However if the program said "stuff = stuff + 1" or even >> "increment(stuff)", I could say "Aha! ..." ... <68@ucbcad.UUCP>: > You should either: (1) Hire programmers who do the right thing, or (2) >Learn C. If there are nice features ... > Anyway, you should admit that you are fighting a losing battle -- C >programmers write programs that should be understood by and only by other >C programmers, and if you don't know C you have no business trying to >understand it. Just when I lost interest in the "x = x + 1" brouhaha, another caustic comment comes in and spoils the boredom. "If you don't know C, you have no business expecting to successfully debug someone else's C program until you've done your homework." (Translate: homework = read a book explaining C.) Now, if more C compilers would do a better job of code optimization ...