OT: Programming in C

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Tue, 2008-04-08 at 15:27 -0400, Steven W. Orr wrote:
> On Tuesday, Apr 8th 2008 at 13:39 -0000, quoth Les:
> 
> =>On Tue, 2008-04-08 at 09:39 -0600, Robin Laing wrote:
> =>> max bianco wrote:
> =>> > I want to learn C and I know there are quite a few programmers on this
> =>> > list.  I am looking for a couple of good books on learning C. I am not
> =>> > exactly a beginner but I am no expert and i would like to start going
> =>> > over everything from scratch. 
> 
> One thing I've noticed over the years is that the majority of C coders out 
> there, no matter how good they are, never really master the ability to 
> composed and decompose complex declarations and references. I don't say 
> this in a perjorative fashion, but I see it a lot and it's important to be 
> able to distinguish between an array of pointers to integers and a pointer 
> to an array of integers, i.e.,
> 
> int *foo[10];
> int (*foo)[10];
> 
> Going through K&R is standard, but this is a basic complaint I've had for 
> a long time.

This comment reminded me of the fabulously useful little utility cdecl
(and its cousin c++decl) which translates between the English
description of a declaration in C (resp. C++) and the actual C (resp.
C++) code itself.

So I went to try them and discovered they weren't installed.

So I went to install them and discovered that they are no longer in the
repository.

That's a shame.  Anyone know why they were dropped?
-- 
                Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs