Re: Getting started with C : Tilde /Dash

Hi

Sorry for this small top post - I'll have to hijack John's reply to get
to get to Dave's comments. Looks like Salford's news server is not
letting everything through again...

My apologies to both druck and JC for doing this.

In article <3e61950b4e.druck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, druck <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On 22 Mar 2006 "Paul F. Johnson" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Um, when was the last time, on here, I gave advice on programming? I've
not dodged any issue, merely said what not to read. You, and you alone,
have decided to just jump on this.

Nothing on pure C has been particularly memorable, but I do recall you
complaining vociferously about one of your programs which had stopped
working after an OS upgrade. It turned out that you'd not read up on a SWI
call and assumed certain values could be used for paramters, this had
worked on the particular OS version you'd developed it on, but on a later
one which checked parameter validity more carefully, it failed. Now this in
itself is no reason for criticism, as no developer can honestly say they
haven't made the same mistake, probably more than once.

Yep. I will openly admit this is probably the case. I remember making a
lot of mistakes and quite a few were this sort of thing. I don't
remember the one you're on about here, but it's a likely event.

However, it was the
way you sort to defended this mistake in an endless thread of circular
arguments, revealing along the way much about your careless attitude to
code development and testing, that caused may here to form the opinion you
weren't best placed to give advice on programming matters.

Which is fair enough. I don't have a problem with that - if you make a
tit of yourself, you can only expect this sort of opinion to be formed.
I will say though that not everyone formed that opinion or if they did,
were happy enough to let it ride and carry on asking me to write code
for them.

I'm not aware of
if you have subsequently learnt from this or not, but I don't recall seeing
anything here recently that would give us cause to reverse our opinions.

Again, as I very rarely write anything specific for RISC OS, I don't
have occassion to post code to here, so that opinion, though old does
hold water - it's validity though should be tempered with the events
you're on about being about 6 years back (if memory serves me correctly)
and in all likelihood, won't be the case now. Sure, I've given no-one in
here any evidence to say "hey, I'm not that arsehole I was then and my
code is good and clean", but then what I do now is not RISC OS related.

Thanks for your reasoned and considered posting Dave. I've looked back
over groups.google and I really was a twillock!

However, and I'll say it again, irrespective of the views others hold of
me, the opinion expressed on the OP's choice of book is backed up by
many other people, so I'm certainly not on my own.

TTFN

Paul
--
"Logic, my dear Zoe, is merely the ability to be wrong with authority" -
Dr Who

.

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