Talk:C (programming language)

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Ed Poor (talk | contribs) at 23:01, 6 December 2001 (months might be in a zero-based array). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Do you think it's good to use /Evolution for writing down the changes, or /K and R C will suffice? Thanks, Uriyan

Actually I don't think either topic deserves a sub-page. I think a section on the main page would do. --drj


=== Eccentricity ===
In C, the months of the year are numbered wrong. They are all low by 1. For example: January is month 0. December is month 11. This is not an obvious problem to English-speakers, but if your native language uses numbers to name the months of the year...

Numbering from 0 is not eccentricity. It's how computers think. --Taw

That also has nothing at all to do with the C language, but with the standard libraries--that distinction should be made. --LDC

I don't even think thats an eccentricity since its fairly common in programming to do it that way --Alan D

Java uses the same numbering scheme. Possibly because there is a zero-based array of month names. Although numbering from zero in both C and Java is more of a convenience for the routines that perform array handling than anything else. If your array starts at ___location AC00, the address of the 0th element is AC00, the address of element 1 is AC00 + element_length, the address of the 2nd element is AC00 + 2 * element_length, and so on. I prefer to start at element 1, but we're all pretty much stuck with the convention. (Perhaps I'll step up and start writing about software engineering, something I actually have some expertise in.) Ed Poor



The claim that C is the dominant microcomputer applications language is now somewhat dubious, IMHO. In the Windows world, it's probably a toss-up between Microsoft's C++ and Visual Basic, I'd guess. C still rules for embedded systems (that is, the ones not written in Assembler), in the Unix world (particularly for apps that don't have a GUI), and people who can't be bothered remembering C++'s arcane semantics for multiple inheritance and operator overloading :) --Robert Merkel


Recent stats of what percent of code in RedHat distro is written in which programing language, clearly shows that C is dominant, at least on Unices. It's very probable that C++ is much more popular on Windoze world, but I seriously doubt that many apps are written in VB. --Taw


Are we talking commercial apps or what? VB is insanely popular inside IT departments, but for commercial software its always been limited by that damn runtime DLL. C++ seems to rule commercial apps. As for C, its probly less common on windows than C++ at this point.