A
Anand Hariharan
Dear everyone
I've been lurking in this group for a few weeks now. Originally I had a
question to ask (about atomic/threadsafe operations in C), and I wanted
to get the feel of the newsgroup first.
That's always a good idea -- to lurk and get a feel for the group before
you post. In the case of this group, you'd also get to read the FAQ's
that get posted periodically.
In fact I've got to know it well
enough that I realize there's no point in even asking my question, which
would be vilified as "off topic".
Methinks you wouldn't be given grief if you know your post to be OT, and
say that "I know this is OT, but I seek answers for yada yada. I'd
appreciate if you could answer me anyway or tell me where I can find the
same".
(...)
Then there are lots of other people with a bizarre view of what is "on
topic" and "off topic", where fundamental concepts of C are (for their
own completely arbitrary reasons) verboten in this group. This stupidity
will drive away ordinary C programmers who might want to share their
knowledge and experience!
I wish people would see what a useful resource this group could be if it
weren't for a noisy minority of morons who spoil it for everyone else
with their negativity and aggression towards other views.
To be fair, c.l.c++ and a.c.l.l.c-c++ do tend to give more latitude w.r.t
topicality of posts. E.g.,
* They allow discussion of implementations ("I compile this code
on this compiler and I get these diagnostics and/or this
behaviour, whereas the same code on this compiler gives me
different diagnostics/behaviour -- which is correct?")
* They allow discussion of licensing ("The language requires me to
put in this implementation in a header file? I want to license
my code in GPL. How do I go about it?")
* They allow discussion of boost libraries (a concerted community
effort in building C++ libraries), hitherto not in the C++
standard.
* They even allow rants ("Aaargh! WTF does this compiler error
mean?!")
To a large extent, this has to do with C++'s language being orders of
magnitude more complex than C, and a lack of widespread availability
of implementations that conform to a standard that was released more
than a decade ago. C90 has neither of these characteristics.
Am not saying this justifies any responses you may get, but it certainly
does explain why you may not get bitten or chewed if you post your code
(that has mistakes) in say a.c.l.l.c-c++ but might if you do in c.l.c.
- Anand