Re: Algorithms-HOWTO tentative outline

["David C. Merrill, Ph.D." <dcmerrill@mindspring.com>]

From: "Andrew P Moise" <moise+@andrew.cmu.edu>
> Excerpts from mail: 26-Oct-100 Re: Algorithms-HOWTO tentat.. by David C.
> Merrill@mindspr
> > I would not recommend including a primer for C. Keep your focus to the
> > algorithms; it's a big job in itself. If you *do* write a C primer,
I'd
> > like to see it as a separate document that might eventually be
expanded
> > into a full guide to C programming.
>
>   My words were unclear... I'm cocky, but I'm not that cocky :-).  I
> meant a short list of gotchas (returning stack structs, 0 is not NULL,
> odd operator precedence, etc.), which I thought at one point could be
> helpful enough to a large part of the HOWTO's audience (talented but
> inexperienced C programmers) that breaking the HOWTO's focus completely
> was justified.  I'm inclined not to include it, but the inclination's

I get you now. Maybe you could simply point out the gotchas where they
appear in the example code? That would help students (using the term
loosely) to understand the algorithms, and would be more immediately
helpful than listing them in a separate section of the document. DocBook
appears to have some interesting facilities for annotating program
listings, although I haven't tried them out myself yet.

> weak enough that I thought it bore mentioning.  Including a link to a
> similar page now seems like a better idea, but the best thing I know of
> is the Ten Commandments for C Programmers, which seems to be several
> decades out of date.  Any ideas?

The Development of the C Language
Dennis M Ritchie
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html

Programming in C:  A Tutorial
Dennis M. Ritchie
http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-tutor.html

Dinkum C Library Reference
P.J. Plauger
http://www.dinkumware.com/htm_cl/index.html

And there are *many* more references online. Or, perhaps you would be
better off just linking to Google's Web Directory, which is at
http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Programming/Languages/C/ Let
them do the grunt work of maintaining the directory instead of you. Repeat
after me, "Search engines are your friends!" ;p

Regards,

--
David C. Merrill, Ph.D.
Linux Documentation Project
Collection Editor & Coordinator
www.LinuxDoc.org



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