Re: Should we broaden the topicality of this group?

user923005 wrote:
On Oct 1, 2:43 pm, Ian Collins <ian-n...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Malcolm McLean wrote:
"Chris Hills" <ch...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
I want to be able to discuss C as it is used. Which is Not pure ISO C.
If you want to discus just pure ISO C go to comp.std.c
I write virtually all of my work programs in pure ISO C. The exception
is those which are parallelised, and call the MPI library. I've also got
a "Baby X" GUI project which isn't going anywhere very fast.
You are probably part of the small minority of the small minority of C
programmers who know what pure ISO C is who use it...

Most C programmers these days will be doing embedded and DSP work, which
invariably makes heavy use of the extensions provided by the vendor for
the specific target. I'm not saying that most of the code for these
environments can't be written in standard C, with platform specifics
confined to separate modules (I do this and encourage others to do the
same), but that is simply isn't.

So I think that while encouraging standard C, a group such as this
should cater for all C programmers and not pounce on any non-standard
code like a pack of wolves. By all means point out a more correct way,
but don't let the corrections swamp the often simple answer to the
original question. All too often threads here degenerate into what is
and what isn't standard C long after the original question has been
answered.

How about we all try to answer the specific questions asked first, then
point out how to correct non-standard forms? I'm sure it wouldn't be
too hard to make c.l.c a more friendly place.

I guess that redirection to a dsp group is better than answering the
question here. In such a case a polite redirection serves the OP
better than giving the answer here.

On the other hand, it may be that this group is the best place to
answer it. In that case it should be answered here. If the answer is
a single sentence or something innocuous like that, then the best
answer may be to answer the question directly along with redirection
to a better newsgroup. However lengthy answers about DSP specific
stuff are of no interest to me {for instance}. I suspect that you
would not be terribly interested in how to navigate an OpenVMS
directory structure. Someone else might object to Windows API calls.
Yet another person might not want to know about shared memory on
Linux. In short, I think that long discussions about things that are
*better* answered elsewhere are a disservice to the newsgroup and to
the OP.

I should have expressed my view clearer, I didn't intend to say provide
a detailed answer to a completely platform specific question which would
be better answered elsewhere. I was referring to the common form of
question where there is an obvious C language problem, but the posted
code contains something non standard, say <conio.h> or <curses.h>. More
often than not, these are dismissed as off-topic by virtue of the
platform specific code when there is a simple platform neutral answer.

Sure if the question relates directly to the behavior of platform
specific libraries or tools politely send the poster to a more
appropriate group.

--
Ian Collins.
.

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