Path: csiph.com!news.mixmin.net!eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Tim Rentsch Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: "Catch-23: The New C Standard,Sets the World on Fire" by Terence Kelly with Special Guest Borer Yekai Pan Date: Tue, 02 May 2023 07:12:02 -0700 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 21 Message-ID: <86mt2m2571.fsf@linuxsc.com> References: <87zg7n89zw.fsf@bsb.me.uk> <87leirkotx.fsf@zotaspaz.fatphil.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="a5ed23c0072bcec5fb0daec640c9c411"; logging-data="839765"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX18PCxF4rY/Qg6Mr+4/B3tyQWnlo1qAAv3Q=" User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.4 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:5SOwZNbFel5t2Hk5jxjMsWe7dBs= sha1:nDOfHZRUwe28YrdVzMXiORmH8k8= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.c:170165 Phil Carmody writes: [...] > However, oh my, that example code they include is almost comically > ugly, and I'd even go as far as to say unidiomatic for the language: > https://dl.acm.org/cms/attachment/html/ > 10.1145/3588242/assets/html/db9_fig1.png > That's even more hilarious given their later emphasis on use of > idioms. The code in the paper is written not to be an example of production quality code but to illustrate what the authors are saying about using realloc(). The code is knowingly simplified to do that. The paper points out this simplification later on, in point 1 of the "Drills" section: "Figure 1's stack sacrifices speed for clarity and brevity", along with a reference to Kernighan and Pike's book "The Practice of Programming". I suspect lots of people react to the paper mainly on the basis of their impression of this code, without understanding why the code is there or what it is meant to illustrate.