Sunday, May 01, 2005

GOC programming

I did something I had not done in a couple of years this week, some good-old C programming (GOC). You might find this odd, but it is true. And me, a confirmed C hacker for years. Recently I had be obliged to do Java (which I like), C# which I like considerably less and lots and lots of JavaScript. You might laugh at my JavaScript hacking, but I did construct a large OO JavaScript scaffold that served me very well for a couple of years. There are cool things about JavaScript that you don't get with anything else (I like expando classes where you can just add a method to an existing object and everything works...

Anyway this is about C programming. I have done a lot of C programming in my life and it is the one language where I consider that I could figure out what the compiler would do by looking at the source code. Imagine my embarassement when I wasted 15 minutes trying to figure out why my close() wasn't working (Compiler was really expecting fclose()). Oh well, it took me a while to get back into the swing of things, but I new I arrived when I coded:

(*mylist)[(*nbmylist)++]->name = strdup(myname);

It was here I rediscovered why I love C and I challenge python weenie to prove me wrong.