Memories of Learning C

Monday, 17 October 2011

Herb Sutter's latest blog entry invites us to share our memories of our first C program, in tribute to Dennis Ritchie. I can't remember what my first C program was, but I thought I'd write about my memories of learning C.

I studied Physics at college, and there was very little programming taught as part of the course. That didn't bother me though; I'd taught myself to program up until then, and I wasn't going to stop now. The big benefit I got from computing at college was access to the internet, and access to C and C++ compilers. I could program in BASIC, Pascal and a couple of forms of assembly language, and I'd eagerly read Stan Lippman's C++ Primer and written out (on paper!) some C++ code, but I hadn't yet had a C++ compiler to try out my programs on.

I wrote several C++ programs before I even considered writing a plain C program, but I probably typed in and compiled the classic printf("hello world\n"); C program to check everything was working before I compiled any C++.

Usenet

My strongest memories about learning C are about learning from usenet. Though I had access to C compilers at college, access to experts was not so readily available unless you were studying computing. With access to the internet, I didn't need local experts though — usenet provided access to experts from across the world. I read comp.lang.c and comp.lang.c++ avidly, and taught myself both languages together. The usenet community was invaluable to me. The wealth of knowledge that people had, and their willingness to share with newbies was something I really appreciated.

I remember struggling over file handling, and getting the arguments to scanf right; I remember puzzling over the poor performance of a program and having someone kindly point out that my code was doing malloc and free calls in a tight loop. Though I tend to answer more questions than I ask these days, I still hang out on newgroups such as comp.lang.c++ today. It seems that for many people StackOverflow has replaced usenet as the place to go for help, but the old-style newsgroups are still valuable.

Ubiquity

Back then, C++ compilers were in their infancy. Templates didn't work on every compiler, there was no STL, and many platforms didn't have a working C++ compiler at all. I consequently wrote a lot of C — every platform had a C compiler, and my C code would work on the college PCs, my PC (when I saved up enough to buy one), the University's Unix machine, and the Physics department workstations. The same could not be said for C++.

The ubiquity of C is something I still appreciate today, and this is only possible because Dennis Ritchie designed his language to be portable to multiple platforms. Though "implementation defined" behaviour can be frustrating when the implementation defines it a different way to how you would like, it is this that enables the portability. You want to write code for a DSP that only handles 32-bit data? Fine: make char, short, int and long all 32-bits. What if your machine has 9-bit bytes? No problem: just make char 9 bits, and everything else a convenient multiple of that.

C is the basic lingua-franca of the computing world. It is a "portable assembly language". These days I use C++ where I can because it allows a higher level of abstraction, and easier expression of intent without compromising on the performance you'd get with plain C, but it's not as portable, and wouldn't be possible without C.

The computing world owes a lot to Dennis Ritchie.

Posted by Anthony Williams
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Tags: C, nostalgia
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