>>29
Please take a moment to read my post. As a rather experienced C programmer, I can tell
you right now that K&R is crystal clear. Please post further details, such as
the paragraphs/sentences that you found unclear, the other books that you have
read and anything that will aid us in helping you better. C does not have
basic and complex semantics. There are only two types of C
programmers in this world: those who know C and those who think they do. Feel
free to join the latter group, though I don't advice it for a number of reasons.
Please follow my advice, or any reasonable advice for that matter. K&R is
not a style guide. It appears that you are rather confused about what
programming standards are, so please let me explain.
When C was first visualized and conceptualized by Kernigham and Ritchie (surely
and others too, such as K. Thompson, who played an important role in C's history)
they had to introduce the language to other programmers. As such, they decided
to document its features as best as they could, and they wrote a book called
"The C programming language", also known as K&R1. The book standed as a
reference and guide to anyone interested in C programming. Every compiler
developer or programmer was using the de facto book to learn C and study its
aspects. The book was quite ambiguous, and incomplete in many ways. As such,
different compilers behaved differently, and different programmers wrote
different code. The implementation was unclear, and the diagnostic messages
where absent. It was hard to tell whether a bug was in the implementation or the
programmers fault, because there was no "official" reference. C was an
unofficial language used by hackers (not in todays sense hackers). So where do
the standards come in? A standard thoroughly and exhaustingly documents a
subject, and sets the rules. Anyone who is interested in the subject is
expected to use the standard as a reference. ANSI decided to publish a standard
on C, commonly known as C89 (though its official name is ANSI X3.159-1989). The
document was clear and well thought, and compilers quickly adopted it. Now, it
was easy to tell whether an implementation was conforming or not, because the
rules of the standard made all implementations behave the same; That does not
mean it limited their functionality, but rather, it documented the very
functionality expected! You could write code for system/operating system A and
expect it to behave the same on B. However, there were problems with that
standard too, as it wasn't available to the average Joe because it was quite
expensive. Moreover, it could not be used as a tutorial for the language.
Kernighan and Ritchie decided to write another book, K&R2, which served as an
introduction, tutorial, guide and reference to ANSI C. The second book was
excellent and sold millions of copies. Now, almost 20 years later, the
book still stands as an excellent resource for C, and one of the best books
written for it. Still, there were problems with ANSI C. The standard was not
widely available because ANSI is not an international organization. ISO decided
to take charge of C, and published ISO 9899:1990, 9899:1995 and 9899:1999. (also
known as C90, C95 and C99) in chorological order. ISO made C99 freely available
in pdf form. Standards are not only for programming language; they can, for
example, document a file type, such as JPEG; or the representation of
floating-point values in computing. Indeed, there are; Former as ISO 10918-1 and
latter as IEEE-754, which are also widely used.
So, do ask yourself now, should I read a book written 20 years ago that's still
appreciated by experts worldwide, or shall I read a tutorial I found on some
fools blog?
Do not fall into the hedonically appealing temptation of taking the sunny road.
Take my advice as is, read K&R (the alternative is to read H&S). Study, be
patient. Otherwise, you'll be of the second kind of C programmers, which will
also reflect on you as a whole; You'll be a lazy programmer, that prefers
the job done quickly, than the job done properly. Such programmers serve no real
purpose, one could rightfully claim that they don't belong in the computer
world. If C seems to hard for you, try PHP or similar first. Get a sense of what
writing in an imperative programming language feels like, and then try C agai
You got an answer in the previous paragraph for this question, but I shall
repeat just in case. ANSI C is not a coding style, it's a standard. K&R merely
adheres that standard and explains its virtues. A C book that doesn't adhere to
a C standard is quite useless. You can indeed go back, but when you pass the
point of no return, turning back seems so distant. Do you know what that is,
OP? That's the point in a journey where it's longer to go back to the
beginning. It's like when those astronauts got in trouble. Somebody messed up,
and they had to get them back to Earth. But they had passed the point of no return.
They were on the other side of the moon and were out of contact for like hours.
Everybody waited to see if a bunch of dead guys in a can would pop out the other
side. Well, that's me. I'm on the other side of the moon now and everybody is
going to have to wait until I pop out.
There's no reason to go that far if you intent on turning back.