Path: csiph.com!news.mixmin.net!eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Tim Rentsch Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: "Richard Stallman Announces C Reference" Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2022 06:31:09 -0700 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 32 Message-ID: <86h71eqbqa.fsf@linuxsc.com> References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Injection-Info: reader01.eternal-september.org; posting-host="eacead3a04a98f103c487ee10dc191dc"; logging-data="2034517"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+rh8Kqhq0DE+HfW+GyHxPDWJYeTP8p+Wk=" User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.4 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:OIf5g/KFUD6mzFKJ6+ixnv4e4Ro= sha1:m4QaNyOVN9k7DV76kSaD29hs/GE= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.c:167599 John Forkosh writes: > [...] what's your (and any others') review of the book? > Worth reading? Or more importantly to me, good reference > (including good index, table-of-contents, and, of course, > good content)? My reactions, fwiw... The book is not so much about C as it is about Stallman's way of thinking about C. If you want to think about C in the same way that he does, this book is almost certainly the best available. If on the other hand you want to think about C in the same way that C is described and defined in the ISO C standard, this book will probably be more distracting than helpful. Looking over the book (I certainly didn't read the whole thing), my impression is RMS can't make up his mind whether he is writing a reference, a tutorial, or a style guide. I realize that mixing these three aspects is common and fashionable these days when writing about programming languages, but personally it irks me. K&R very wisely divided its material into two parts: one, an introduction and informal description of the language, and two, a reference. That was an excellent choice. The current blender style of mixing everything together is unfortunately more popular now. Also, a low-level detail, but one worth mentioning: the layout and formatting choices in the book, both for prose and for code, reflect (in all likelihood) Stallman's preferences. I'm reminded of Abraham Lincoln's comment, "For people who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing that these people like." Personally I prefer a cleaner formatting and layout style (and yes both for code and for prose).