The problems in comp.lang.c

[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

 

[Kenny McCormack]

... snip several yards of junk, summarized by: ...

Which is standard and accepted. As you may have noticed, the
standards accepted include C99, C95, C90, C89 (identical to C90),
K&RII, and K&RI.

Liar.

Jacob is absolutely right. Posting the above (without suitable
footnoting) will get you "blowback". Somebody will point out that it
"isn't C89".

Happens every time.

 

[Kenny McCormack]

 From what I have observed, this group has big problems.

As someone who chooses to write a long-winded, bullshit rant about
personalities instead of working on obtaining answers to your
technical questions, you fit in rather marvelously, don't you think?[/QUOTE]

Oh oh. Looks like somebody is off their meds...

 

[Chris McDonald]

I think that when c.l.c was created there was no concept of a formal
charter as it exists now. What Jacob posts is a sort of
founding "manifesto", which does indeed encourage discussion of
platform specific details. But that was in 1986, things have changed a
lot since then.

Agreed; times change, and the use of the Internet (including its
great-great grandfather, Usenet) can certainly change along with them.
No charter from the past, when far fewer readers probably had far less
to agree and disagree about, in no a reason to discount one now.

I'm afraid that disagreements will persist. They are fondly held
differences of opinion and a charter, even if one were to be enforced,
is not some Holy Writ for everyone is going to adhere to. The OT posts
are going to continue and so will the trolling of the trolls. The only
real answer is moderation, for which of course there is already a
group, and a spectacular failure at that.

Agreed, disagreements will persist, but so many other corners of the
Internet and Usenet can manage a consensus about their own purpose.
c.l.c. has no extra-ordinary properties that should prevent its smoother
communication. At present a small band of people dismiss many questions
as "off topic", but can only apply their own beliefs as to what that
means, and can't point to any single statement.

A charter, at least, provides something that all participants can point
to and indentify what is topical and what not. Documents (such as Ben
Pfaff's topicality guidance) can easily inform "off topic" users why
their questions are off topic, and could guide them elsewhere, without
the too frequent arguments seen here.

 

[Malcolm McLean]

Utter nonsense. A huge amount of C applications written for the desktop
in C are multithreaded. As you should know since you constantly mention
your Linux knowledge. To suggest that an OS time slicing between single
threaded applications is the same as a single application utilising
multiple threads indicates that your knowledge of the matter is next to
zero.

If you've only got one processor you need to schedule your tasks somehow.
One way is a "yield" statement - and you can implement this system in
stnadard C, admittedly with a bit of a kludge. The other way is timeslicing,
which is what OSes like Windows do.
Maybe I should add threads to BASICdraw. At the momeent it is a
single-threaded app so the controls go grey as the BASIC program executes.

 

[Friedrich Dominicus]

IMHO it is not a good idea to "fight" for such kinds of things. Some
say this Group is about the Standard-Cs but I've read also that there
does not exist a carta. So how about relaxing a bit and give chance to
both sides?

How about tagging questions?

If it's gcc question maybe something like [gcc] in the subject would
be an idea.

I guess a lot of people don't realize that a Standard exists, they
probably have seeen some program in some OS and it was written in C at
least it claims to be written in it. But as others know C does not
have an idea about "OSes". But the reality is that every OS in wider
use is written in some "C-Dialect".

If you see it a bit tighter, we have quite a lot of "overlapping" C
newsgroups we do have

comp.std.c (which for me suggests much more discussion of "Standard C
or C related to standards or the like)

comp.lang.c.moderated (is another group)

We have groups about system specific things and the like.

But let me ask you this where should one discuss things like
libapr http://apr.apache.org/ (It's not Standard C, it's not OS
specific, it rans on so many different platforms, and can show how one
can encapsulate OS specific things in a common API which is "C")

What about other portable libraries like libpcre? libnspr? etc etc.

All here have decided to stick with C in all it's variations, someone
used C on Windows other C on Linux other C on embedded systems etc
etc.

Let me ask another way. I have some C library and I have question
about it what should be the order on where to look?

Well those how now would start on the homepage, then looking for some
mailing lists or other kind of information sources. Now he/she does
not get an answer. So the next would be some newsgroup. The library
happens to run under Linux and Windows should he/she crosspost? Should
one post top comp.lang.misc (although we're talking about a C
library?)

What would be the problem if we see a post here with

Subject: [libfoo] usage question

Everyone not liking anything beyone Standard C could ignore this
message. Other may decide to answer.

I suggest to check out other comp.lang newsgroups. AFAIKT in
comp.lang.ruby all Ruby questions can be asked be it JRuby, Matz's
Ruby, IronRuby and the like

The requirements for posters would not be very high, they should ask
relativ precise questions and better have a nice tag. But would that
be such a high requirement? We'd still have the problems of people not
knowing what Standard C is, but even those should know about what
library they ask.

I for my part would like to see talks about portable libraries, how
people are using C these days. Do you remember the threads about a
safe gets alternative? I found this things interesting, and I
appreciated the broad discussions.

Another urgent problem we do face is multi-threading. C has not idea
about threads, but sill all the libraries are using some C. Where if
not here should this things be discussed? It is not related to
Standards (not yet that may change) it is not that OS-specific (well
it is but the problems one faces are the same on every platform), and
we do have libraris supposed to be portable like libapr, libglib-2,
libnspr which try to offer common API for such kind of things. C is
the base for every networking, using some deviation of BSD-sockets,
but Standard-C has not idea aoout it, but where should that be
discussed it's seen as "just another C library"?

I suggest to discuss how we could solve this.

Regards
Friedrich

 

[Flash Gordon]

jacob navia wrote, On 23/03/08 20:44:

But precisely, WHY do we have to have a censorship? Why can't
we speak about things that we use when programming? There
are no single threaded C programs any more since quite a long time
under any OS like Macintosh, linux, or windows.

Nice to know that SW I spend a lot of time working on does not exist.
There are still a lot of programs that are not threaded even though they
are running on systems that support threading.

WHO SAYS THAT WE CAN'T TALK ABOUT IT?

No one is stopping you from subscribing to comp.programming.threads
where the people who know about threads hang out.

The charter of this group (that I posted here several times)
specifically allows it.

An introductory message from before there were groups for threading and
specific systems, not a charter.

 

[Malcolm McLean]

... snip several yards of junk, summarized by: ...

Which is standard and accepted. As you may have noticed, the
standards accepted include C99, C95, C90, C89 (identical to C90),
K&RII, and K&RI.

The point of insisting on standard compliance is that it is not
possible to talk intelligently about an undefined cloudy thing.
Those standards provide a clear basis for discussion.

Yes it is.
We're currently in the undesireable situation of having a rejected standard,
C99, which means that "standard C" is no longer the precise thing it once
was. That doesn't mean it is impossible to hold a coherent discussion. I
don't think we can legitimately hold C99 to be off-topic, but we should
point out that non-block top declarations are not, de facto, portable.

 

[Flash Gordon]

Anand Hariharan wrote, On 24/03/08 06:57:

On Sun, 23 Mar 2008 16:40:20 +0000, Jeff P. Bailey wrote:


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".

If someone knows the post is off topic but posts it anyway they are
likely to get complaints, although if they only ask where to go to ask
the question this is likely to be minimised.

(...)

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?")

Most people here would see nothing wrong with that question because it
is a question about whether the code is correct or not rather than about
the implementations. In fact, we recently had a post of this sort and
people did not complain about it being off-topic.

* 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?")

Well, that is not language specific.

* They allow discussion of boost libraries (a concerted community
effort in building C++ libraries), hitherto not in the C++
standard.

I don't think there is an equivalent in C.

* They even allow rants ("Aaargh! WTF does this compiler error
mean?!")

That sort of question does not get complaints. Well, sometimes it gets a
complaint of the form, "post the code so we can actually see it!" In
fact, people are more likely to ask to see the exact complier diagnostic
than to be told they should not post it.

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.

People sometimes perceive it as an attack when they get several
complaints failing to understand that Usenet is asynchronous and that
the complainants did not know about each others posts. Generally it
starts getting nasty when some people refuse to accept the redirection
is reasonable.

 

[Jeff P. Bailey]

jacob navia said:

Richard Heathfield wrote:

[snip]

Likewise, I assure you. But I think we differ over who we think the
morons are. If you don't like my articles, why not killfile me?

I would say the same. Good advice. You could use it yourself and
stop answering my posts.

Since it is in your commercial interest to have as few people as possible
pointing out your misunderstandings, blunders, and product plugs, your
response does not surprise me at all. It may surprise *you*, however, to
discover that I actually reply to relatively few of your articles. (It may
surprise others, too.)

This is the sort of thing I was talking about - a pointlessly negative
post. Every article of jacob's I've read has been well-informed and
useful - and if his posts put C in its wider context, instead of being
narrowly focussed on minor details, then so much the better!

What I really can't understand is why people are /so/ exclusive. A
reasonable person would say that threads (which will certainly be part
of the next C++ standard, and I believe are also being considered for
the next C standard) are a topic of interest to C programmers, whereas
the breeding habits of gazelle aren't. And if something's borderline,
why not "be liberal in what you accept"?

The reason it seems crazy to me is that it costs you (in Thunder Bird at
least) a single key-press to *ignore* a thread that you're not
interested in - you don't need to reply to it, or even take any time
seeing any more posts in the thread once you've ignored it. Making a
series of "that's off topic" posts takes /much/ more time than just
pressing the ignore key!

 

[Malcolm McLean]

The reason it seems crazy to me is that it costs you (in Thunder Bird at
least) a single key-press to *ignore* a thread that you're not interested
in - you don't need to reply to it, or even take any time seeing any more
posts in the thread once you've ignored it. Making a series of "that's off
topic" posts takes /much/ more time than just pressing the ignore key!

Trivia is important with computers, because of the way that the technology
makes it cheaper to send information than to receive.

 

[JimS]

Walter Roberson wrote:

[snip]

Most of the
programs I wrote during that period that somehow involved networking
worked upon stored syslog files -- their topic was networking
but the programs themselves required no networking, just text files.

Granted. there *are* programs that aren't multi-threaded (a compiler
for instance ) but they are the exception to the rule...

Visual Studio 2008 lets you specify how many concurrent threads to use
while compiling. What the quantum is would be very interesting.

Jim

 

[jacob navia]

Walter Roberson wrote:

[snip]

Most of the
programs I wrote during that period that somehow involved networking
worked upon stored syslog files -- their topic was networking
but the programs themselves required no networking, just text files.

Granted. there *are* programs that aren't multi-threaded (a compiler
for instance ) but they are the exception to the rule...

Visual Studio 2008 lets you specify how many concurrent threads to use
while compiling. What the quantum is would be very interesting.

Jim

make -j does that under unix too, but this is not the compiler
that is being run multi-threaded but the make process, starting
several compilations at the same time in DIFFERENT source files.

I was speaking about the compiler itself.

One possible parallelization within a single source file would be to
compile at the same time different functions, but this would be
so heavy on communications requirements between threads that
would not be worth the huge effort.

 

[Richard Heathfield]

Kaz Kylheku said:

It would be a useless forum where the clueless would freely spread
misinformation, giving answers which are incorrect and nonportable.

For instance, newbies would be told that fflush(stdin) is the way to
discard unread input characters, and nobody would have the spine to
call this nonsense, because it's not nice to argue.

It *isn't* nice to argue, even when people post nonsense, but - as you
imply - the arguing is a service to those newbies who may be misled by the
nonsense. The trouble comes when the same people post nonsense over and
over and over again, and are corrected (as a service to those same
newbies) by the same person over and over and over again. Eventually, he
is accused of war-mongering, whereas the real culprits are those who post
the nonsense.

<snip>

 

[CBFalconer]

CBFalconer wrote:
.... snip ...


Once in a while? Nearly all GUI based applications these days are
multithreaded. When it's needed it cannot be substituted easily
with multitasking, unless each logical "thread" of an application
was split into separate intercommunicating processes, which only
increases overhead unnecessarily.

No - the sort of thing that goes on is that various processes are
multi-tasked, without ever doing anything multi-tasking specific.
Or, for example, you ask for terminal input. The system doesn't
waste its time checking for keypresses. It goes off and does other
things until a keypress occurs, and then returns and presents its
result. No multitasking games required. But arranging for that
keypress to be reported on occurence is actually complex, and
probably involves various bufferes, interrupts, timers, process
priorities, whatever. It's in the OS, not the program.

 

[Richard Heathfield]

santosh said:

Richard wrote:



Um, what about the "moderators" of moderated forums?

What about a little checking of claims? The above claims:

(a) "that he decides is topical" - I have publicly stated on quite a few
occasions that I would like to widen the topicality of the group, but I am
abiding by the group's consensus, which is against the idea. That isn't me
deciding - it's the group deciding (with a minority complaining that the
decision went against them and therefore isn't a good decision). His claim
is false.

(b) "obnoxious posturing when someone disagrees with him" - lots of people
disagree with me all the time. Disagreement is practically the default
state of Usenet (to the point where someone who posts a reply that does
*not* disagree with a previous reply often feels obliged to point it out).
So what your pet troll is claiming is that practically every article I
post is "obnoxious posturing". Well, maybe he really believes that. But in
fact most of the articles I write are pretty run-of-the-mill stuff - just
straightforward contributions to technical discussions. What's more, most
of what I write is pretty anodyne, even when the trolls are around.
Compare and contrast. His claim is false.

Note, also, that I have not appointed myself as anything, least of all a
group guardian. I take my share of responsibility for that, but so does
everybody here - don't they? So that claim, too, is false.

As for bending and distorting the rules (whence your comment about
moderators), yes, lots of people bend and distort the rules here. It's
happening all the time. Even people with high S/N ratios and therefore
excellent reputations sometimes risk posting a little OT material. To spot
Chris Torek's S/N, you need a telescope, and to scale his reputation you
need a top of the range LTI fire ladder - but he is not averse to a little
OT discussion on occasion (although in his case such occasions are
remarkably few in number).

Trolls are the worst culprits at bending and distorting the rules. They
contribute practically nothing to the group, and distract valuable
resources away from useful discussions. You're currently arguing with
possibly one of the three worst trolls currently in clc - his S/N ratio is
practically microscopic (although it dwarfs those of his two side-kicks).
His S/N ratio is in the cellar, last seen searching for a pick and shovel.
It's probably best not to encourage him.

Strictly egalitarian groups are mostly a myth.

Everyone knows that Chris Torek owns this group.

 

[Richard Heathfield]

Jeff P. Bailey said:

jacob navia said:

Richard Heathfield wrote:

[snip]


Likewise, I assure you. But I think we differ over who we think the
morons are. If you don't like my articles, why not killfile me?


I would say the same. Good advice. You could use it yourself and
stop answering my posts.

Since it is in your commercial interest to have as few people as
possible pointing out your misunderstandings, blunders, and product
plugs, your response does not surprise me at all. It may surprise *you*,
however, to discover that I actually reply to relatively few of your
articles. (It may surprise others, too.)

This is the sort of thing I was talking about - a pointlessly negative
post.

It is, I agree, mostly negative in tone. I do not agree that it is
pointlessly so.

Every article of jacob's I've read has been well-informed and
useful

Then you have not read very many of them.

A reasonable person would say that threads (which will certainly be part
of the next C++ standard, and I believe are also being considered for
the next C standard) are a topic of interest to C programmers, whereas
the breeding habits of gazelle aren't.

That is very unlikely to be true. There will be at least one or two C
programmers, somewhere in the world, who are very interested in the
breeding habits of gazelles. They might even be modelling breeding
patterns in a C program, for conservation purposes. So *obviously* the
breeding habits of gazelles should be topical here. And that way madness
lies.

And if something's borderline,
why not "be liberal in what you accept"?

The whole point of Usenet topics is that you find a group that discusses a
topic that you find interesting, not that the topic of the group changes
to match your interests. It's like shops. You go into a shop selling fine
wines, the kind that's several hundred LCUs a bottle, and you ask for a
steak. But they look at you as if you'd asked them for a stoat. You are
confused. After all, wine goes with steak, right? So you tell them they
*should* sell steak, and they look at you as if you'd asked them for a
lightly grilled stoat with fries. They're not about to start selling steak
just because you like steak. The fact that wine goes well with steak is
not going to persuade them to change their mind.

The reason it seems crazy to me is that it costs you (in Thunder Bird at
least) a single key-press to *ignore* a thread that you're not
interested in

And several thousand keypresses a day to ignore the several thousand
threads we're not interested in, and that can take an hour or more of
time. By the time clc descends to that level, it will have lost all the
people that make it worth reading.

- you don't need to reply to it, or even take any time
seeing any more posts in the thread once you've ignored it. Making a
series of "that's off topic" posts takes /much/ more time than just
pressing the ignore key!

Nevertheless, it seems to keep the off-topic posts to a manageable level.

 

[Richard Heathfield]

Friedrich Dominicus said:

IMHO it is not a good idea to "fight" for such kinds of things. Some
say this Group is about the Standard-Cs but I've read also that there
does not exist a carta. So how about relaxing a bit and give chance to
both sides?

How about tagging questions?

If it's gcc question maybe something like [gcc] in the subject would
be an idea.

If you want to develop this idea, bear in mind the experience of some other
Usenet groups who use them, i.e. that Google Groups has been known to rip
tags out of subject lines posted via its servers. ("Do no evil"? Ha!)

 

[Willem]

Richard wrote:
) Jeff P. Bailey said:
)> Every article of jacob's I've read has been well-informed and
)> useful
)
) Then you have not read very many of them.

Or, more likely IMHO, does not have the know-how to recognize when a post
is well-informed and helpful, and when it only seems to be, but actually
contains subtle misinformation which makes that which seems helpful
actually detrimental in the long run.

Which is exactly why people who *do* have the know-how should respond,
pointing out the subtle misubderstandings and misinformation.


SaSW, Willem
--
Disclaimer: I am in no way responsible for any of the statements
made in the above text. For all I know I might be
drugged or something..
No I'm not paranoid. You all think I'm paranoid, don't you !
#EOT

 

[Kenny McCormack]

(snipped)

The important thing to remember is that whenever you are reading any
post from Heathfield, you should always have the "lying sack of crap" (*)
jingle going in the back of your mind.

This goes also for whenever you are listening to anything said by
GWB, with whom, it has been pointed out, RH shares many attributes
(including this one).

(*) Google it.

As long as you keep that jingle going in the back of your mind, RH's
posts can be quite entertaining.