A C tutorial

[Mike Wahler]

Something that calls itself Bubba wrote:
[snip]

You are mistaken.

[snip]

Arthur,

Please don't feed the trolls.

Eh, not hungry, Robert?

-Mike

 

[Mike Wahler]

The spell checker is inexistent almost.

That certainly appears to be the case.


-Mike

 

[Mike Wahler]

Excellent. Program text indentation should be easily preserved
with <pre> </pre> enclosures. You might also look into the info
system, which can prepare html, pdf, info, text and ps output from
common source. All open source.

"info system"? Does that have a more 'formal' name? Do you
have URL? Thanks.

-Mike

 

[Christian Bau]

Look, I have taken the time to prepare:
ftp://ftp.cs.virginia.edu/pub/lcc-win32/tutorial.zip

It is in html format and only 600K. You can read it with your
browser. Many small things have disappeared, like the
indentation of program text, but it is still quite readable

I am in no way associated with Adobe corp. Neither do I want to do any
publicity for them.

But PDF is a widely used format, and there are many tools under linux
that
understand it perfectly. I could have put the post script file, but it
is 40MB,
zipping it reduces it to 12MB, quite considerable still. So I produced
zipped html.

To be honest, anyone using a Macintosh will be extremely keen on PDF
files, and they will _not_ use Acrobat Reader to view it. For example, I
can open the C Standard in PDF format, type any word in a search box,
and get a complete list of all occurences of that word, with context and
page number, about at the time that I finished typing. That is on a two
year old machine that wasn't too fast back then.

("Inadequate tools" springs to my mind).

 

[Christian Bau]

That certainly appears to be the case.

When writing tutorials, a spelling checker is usually much more useful
than a spell checker anyway. Harry Potter might need a spell checker, I
certainly don't.

 

[CBFalconer]

"info system"? Does that have a more 'formal' name? Do you
have URL? Thanks.

If you are using windoze any of DJGPP, MINGW, CYGWIN will provide
a suitable environment for the system. Once you get over a
learning curve (which I haven't) you can get on-line output for
the info viewer, man output, pdf, ps, html, xml, even tex.
However, it is not a wysiwyg system.

Some excerpts from documentation on my system:

 

[Dan Pop]

Is the source code freely available, so that I can assure myself that the
program contains no malicious code?

On how much of the software you're currently using have you already
performed this check?

Dan

 

[Dan Pop]

I disagree that the argument is spurious. It's true that I don't scan most
programs for malicious code; I don't have to, because - since they're Open
Source - lots of people have done this already,

How do you know it? If everyone reasons like you, no one is actually
doing it

Dan

 

[Dan Pop]

Oh, I know, I know. That doesn't mean it necessarily /should/ be.

Name one document format with a public specification that should be
used instead, allowing for comparable quality of the printed output.
And explain why that format should be used instead of PDF.

Dan

 

[Martin Dickopp]

How do you know it? If everyone reasons like you, no one is actually
doing it

For the record, I often read the source code of Free Software, which
disproves that /no one/ is doing it.

Martin

 

[Jarno A Wuolijoki]

For the record, I often read the source code of Free Software, which
disproves that /no one/ is doing it.

Cool,

Now you only need to show that your reasoning is after all similar
to Heathfields and that merely reading software for other reasons than
scanning for malicious code constitutes as "it" and you'll have Dan
nailed for false statement

 

[Richard Heathfield]

In <[email protected]> Richard Heathfield


On how much of the software you're currently using have you already
performed this check?

(a) Non sequitur. If the source is available then I can, if I wish, perform
this check. Whether I then choose to do so is entirely up to me.

(b) Even though it's a non sequitur, I'll answer it. I have performed this
check on /some/ of the software I use, but not all.

 

[Richard Heathfield]

In <[email protected]> Richard Heathfield


Name one document format with a public specification that should be
used instead, allowing for comparable quality of the printed output.
And explain why that format should be used instead of PDF.

Text works for me. No public spec needed; if there's anyone out there who
doesn't know what text is, I probably don't want to read their stuff
anyway.

As for the printed output, it looks pretty good from where I'm standing. If
your text printout quality is low, consider investing in a better printer.

 

[Dan Pop]

For the record, I often read the source code of Free Software, which
disproves that /no one/ is doing it.

Do you know what "if" means in English?

Dan

 

[Martin Dickopp]

Do you know what "if" means in English?

Suffice it to say that what I wrote contains no indication that I don't.
If you disagree, please be more elaborate.

Martin

 

[Dan Pop]

(a) Non sequitur. If the source is available then I can, if I wish, perform
this check. Whether I then choose to do so is entirely up to me.

Nope, it's not a non sequitur: if you don't perform such scans, the
ability to perform them becomes irrelevant.

(b) Even though it's a non sequitur, I'll answer it. I have performed this
check on /some/ of the software I use, but not all.

Therefore, you have no a priori reason to reject Acrobat Reader: you're
already using software you haven't scanned.

There is a nice paper by Ken Thompson, proving that such scans cannot
guarantee a lack of malicious code being included in the application,
unless you have assembled your own compiler. He had included a backdoor
in Unix via the C compiler and no matter how carefully you'd study the
source code of the C compiler, that you could use to rebuild the compiler
from the sources, you'd see nothing because there was nothing left in the
source code. The malicious code was inside the executable of the compiler
that was coming with the system and it would reproduce itself in the
binaries of the clean compiler you'd compile with that compiler.

Dan

 

[Dan Pop]

Text works for me. No public spec needed; if there's anyone out there who
doesn't know what text is, I probably don't want to read their stuff
anyway.

As for the printed output, it looks pretty good from where I'm standing. If
your text printout quality is low, consider investing in a better printer.

Show us how you can use the plain text format to display a complex
mathematical formula or the picture of your cat (dog, whatever)
with a quality comparable to that obtained from a PDF document.

Dan

 

[Dan Pop]

Suffice it to say that what I wrote contains no indication that I don't.
If you disagree, please be more elaborate.

Reread the underlined text above and explain what it was supposed to mean.

Dan

 

[Richard Heathfield]

In <[email protected]> Richard Heathfield


Nope, it's not a non sequitur: if you don't perform such scans, the
ability to perform them becomes irrelevant.


Therefore, you have no a priori reason to reject Acrobat Reader:

Yes, I do.

you're
already using software you haven't scanned.

But I'm not using /Adobe/ software that I haven't scanned.

There is a nice paper by Ken Thompson,

I know. I don't have a problem trusting gcc.

 

[Mark McIntyre]

Text works for me. No public spec needed; if there's anyone out there who
doesn't know what text is, I probably don't want to read their stuff
anyway.

Not trying to be difficult, but if you can define "text" then I'll feel
happier. Bearing in mind that at least one popular OS makes no distinction
between "text" and "binary" data. Hey, thats nearly topical.

As for the printed output, it looks pretty good from where I'm standing. If
your text printout quality is low, consider investing in a better printer.

I have a colour laser printer, and /still/ all my text docs come out in
crappy black 10pt courier typewriter font, circa 1950 IBM standard, just
the same as it comes out on my chain printer (tho admittedly the
chainprinter causes my neighbours to bang on the wall and call the police,
so I rarely fire it up except after very extensive p*ssups^wparties. I'm
not sure that expensive printers will improve that.

But we digress...