Re: Statement on Schildt submitted to wikipedia today

On 7 Sep, 05:37, spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 7, 6:11 am, Richard Heathfield <r...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In <37cf2239-a2cf-4b2c-8f45-f5b38836a...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
spinoza1111wrote:
== Proposal from Edward G. Nilges 7 Sep 2009 ==


The vandalism of Schildt continues.

You use language oddly. I'd always thought "vandalism" applied to
property not persons. Perhaps to you Schildt is an owned property.

<snip>

This is only partly true. Some of Seebach consists of stylistic
objections and instructions to Schildt as to how to teach C, in a
document that admits that Schildt knows how to do this. Others
consists of *fatwas*,

fatwa: "an Islamic law pronouncing a death sentence upon someone who
is
considered an infidel or a blasphemer" (although apparently the
meaning
in Arabic is merely a religious opinion concerning Islamic law).

that is, admonishments that Schildt may no
longer explain things as if the increment/decrement operators no
longer had a definite timing or meaning,

I cannot believe that someone as knowledgeable as Seebach would claim
that the increment and decrement operators had no meaning. I suspect
your
poor knowledge of C and difficulty with technical language led you
astray.

I'm also sure he didn't say they "had no definite timing"
(whatever *that* means!)

and as if to speak of a stack was an error.

he probebly pointed out that a hardware stack was not necessary for
the
implementation of C. Usully the expression "arguments are pushed onto
the
stack" are disparaged as misleading. I'm not entirely on the side of
the
anti-stackers. Concretism, even if slightly misleading, is sometimes
pedagogically handy. Over concentration on implementation details can
sometimes be unhelpful. Someone once "explained" a telecommunications
switch to me as "it's all shift registers!"; an explanation I found
unhelpful.

It is widely believed today that C99 as a standardization effort
failed rather miserably.

It has been somewhat less than spectacularly successful, yes.

Why?

much less interesting than C89. C89 was *needed* to standardise
existing
practice. Everyone wanted to use C89 (so-called ANSI-C) every
implementor
wanted to stick "ANSI-C" labels on their boxes. With C99 there was no
clear
concensus as to what was wanted (much less than we got in my case),
much
less pressure from users (they already had their "portable assembler)
and
less commitment from vendors (Microsoft said they had no intention of
supporting C99) and some bits were hard (VLAs). The lobby that seemed
to
get the ear of the committeee seemed to be the Fortran people who
wanted
to make C more useable to them. I assume they are a significant group
but complex numbers and anti-aliasing are pretty esoteric to me.

<snip>

It appears to many of us that Schildt was a sacrificial lamb, a
representative of an individual knower, and of the type of
knowledgeable programmer who (like Carthage) had to be destroyed,

Not so. All the guy has to do to be rehabilitated is publish
comprehensive errata. Is that so hard?

"Rehabilitated?" If you were a literate person, you'd know that the
connotation of that word is from Stalinist show trials.

not in my world (UK). The connotation is from parole and prison.
A former wrong-doer who has now reformed.

for his knowledge is now the private property of corporations,

Er, no. His knowledge, such as it is, is in his head and, to some
extent, in his books.

I would expect him to hold the copyright.

<snip>

This despite the fact that the standard destroyed the
very ability to teach C save in the most cautious, and
fundamentalist way,

The Standard provided the very foundation that allows all C teachers
to teach the same language to everybody, if only they will take
advantage of that foundation.

How can they teach it if they cannot explain things in terms of a
common runtime?

the abstract machine. Discuss *what* it does rather than *how* an
implementation does it. I confess I like to have a rough idea about
implementation but not to be too glued to it.

You don't let them talk as if preincrementation and
postincrementation take place at a decidable time,

but it is bounded time. And there is nothing particular about ++ and
--

and you don't let them talk about a stack.

well it's a logical stack, but misleading to leave people with the
impression o a physical stack


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Statement on Schildt submitted to wikipedia today
    ... your attack on Schildt was unwarranted. ... I never claimed to be writing a book review. ... a language well and writing about it is. ... to be a stack as such. ...
    (comp.lang.c.moderated)
  • Re: Another spinoza challenge
    ... language is correlated with high regard for a programming language. ... values are on the stack when a procedure starts, ...
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  • Re: No machine stack and C
    ... in one place Schildt actually gets it *right*. ... need a stack for passing arguments. ... Perhaps he was thinking of phony C compilers from fraudulent vendors. ...
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  • Re: No machine stack and C
    ... Richard Heathfield writes: ... in one place Schildt actually gets it *right*. ... need a stack for passing arguments. ...
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  • Re: No machine stack and C
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    (comp.lang.c)
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