I'm pretty sure I still have mywafer-thin first-edition "The C
Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchey that I bought from the
Caltech bookstore in the Spring of 1983, for use in Computational
Physics.

I had some trouble at first with C's lack of a Boolean type. The
result is that I still have Line 7 of Page 41 memorized verbatim - as
well as the advice's precise page and line numbers:

"True just means non-zero."

I'm pretty sure the much weightier second edition, which covered ANSI
C, contains the exact same statement.

Kids These Days. You simply have not lived until you have written
"K&R C" - as opposed to "ANSI C". That is C without prototypes;
you're lucky if you get a forward reference.

The following is perfectly legal K&R C:

#include <stdio.h>

main()
int argc;
char **argv;
{
printf( "Hello, World!
" );

return 0;
}

There was a period of a couple years of my early career where a
significant portion of my work was going through huge codebases to add
ANSI C prototypes and to declare ints explicitly rather than having
them just assumed where such assumptions were legal.

Dennis Ritchey may be a diety but he is not quite a God. God Almighty
would have had function prototypes from the very start.

Ever Faithful,

Don Quixote



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13.10.2011 17:54, Peter A kirjoitti:
> And in my opinion, Dennis' death is reason enough to change the F17 name even
> though it has already been voted upon... After all that is what paying your
> final respect is - changing your plans to acknowledge the passing of someone
> great. When you have a minute of silence, you don't just go out and say "mourn
> for a minute whenever don't have anything better to do" but you set a time and
> no matter what is going on, expect people to show their respects...
>
> Peter.
>

+1
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On 10/13/2011 12:02 PM, Don Quixote de la Mancha wrote:
> I'm pretty sure I still have mywafer-thin first-edition "The C
> Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchey that I bought from the
> Caltech bookstore in the Spring of 1983, for use in Computational
> Physics.

Hi kid ;D

The copy on my shelf is 1978.

My first intro to the Unix world was a Bell Labs blue book that
described its conception and how it was written in B. K & R came up
with C, wrote a compiler for it in B, and used the whole shebang to
recompile Unix from the world of B into the world of C. Geniuses.

Nostalgia Lane is WOT but fun to visit.
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On 10/13/2011 12:02 PM, Don Quixote de la Mancha wrote:
> The following is perfectly legal K&R C:
>
> #include<stdio.h>
>
> main()
> {
> printf( "Hello, World!
" );
> }

As is the above, with the redundant statements removed.
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+1

On 10/13/2011 12:10 PM, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> On Thursday 13 October 2011 15:41:24 Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> Fedora 17 name has already been voted upon. Fedora 18 codename
>> suggestions will be requested when Fedora 17 is about to be released
> I think it would be more appropriate to rename F16, rather than wait for a
> whole year to pay respects to the man. Since Ritche was a key inventor of both
> C and UNIX, I believe a case can be made to make an exception and rename the
> first upcoming release, which will be F16.
>
> Rahul, can you present the case to the relevant people, maybe open a vote on
> it so that everyone can formally state their opinion?
>
> My suggestion is the following:
>
> (1) Rename F16 to "Ritchie" (or "Dennis", whatever people like better),
> (2) Rename F17 to "Verne" (in order not to insult the great writer),
> (3) Rename F18 to "Beefy Miracle" (in order to keep the chain of "is a"
> naming).
>
> I think that is the least Fedora Community can do to pay respects to Dennis
> Ritchie. Opinions?
>
> Best, :-)
> Marko
>


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On 10/13/2011 12:13 PM, Mike Wright wrote:
> The copy on my shelf is 1978.

My copy is, alas, long gone, but I got it in either '84 or '85. I was
working at JPL at the time, assisting a blind programmer who was busy
doing pointer arithmetic in FORTRAN77[1]. He's the only person I ever
knew who could write PL/1 programs in FORTRAN instead of the other way
around.

[1]It's amazing, isn't it, what you can do if you turn of bounds
checking on arrays and know what you're doing?
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Joe Zeff <joe <at> zeff.us> writes:

> As is the above, with the redundant statements removed.

The return value is undefined without the return statement.




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+1
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Andre Robatino <robatino <at> fedoraproject.org> writes:

> The return value is undefined without the return statement.

Although looking at my copy of K&R 2, the early examples don't include the
return statement either (it's used later, though).




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On 10/13/2011 12:27 PM, Andre Robatino wrote:
> Joe Zeff<joe<at> zeff.us> writes:
>
>> As is the above, with the redundant statements removed.
>
> The return value is undefined without the return statement.
>

True, but if you're not testing it, who cares?
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