Re: Top 10 most common hard skills listed on resumes...

On 08/09/2024 16:37, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

On 08.09.2024 16:12, James Kuyper wrote:

On 9/8/24 00:39, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
...

That's why I immediately see the necessity that compiler creators need
to know them in detail to _implement_ "C". And that's why I cannot see
how the statement of the C-standard's "most important purpose" would

sound reasonable (to me). ...
>
I agree - the most important purpose is for implementors, not developers.
>

... I mean, what will a programmer get from the
"C" standard that a well written text book doesn't provide?

>
What the C standard says is more precise and more complete than what
most textbooks say.

 Exactly. And this precision is what makes standard often difficult
to read (for programming purposes for "ordinary" folks).
 

Yes.  A standard is a different thing from a textbook, a tutorial, or a reference.

If a textbook doesn't answer a question I have I'd switch to another
(better) textbook, (usually) not to the standard.
 

Or ask someone :-)
Not everyone needs to be an expert in the details of a programming language.
Often a good online reference is more helpful - this one is the best I know of (and I believe it is recommended and supported by the C++ standards committee):
<https://en.cppreference.com/>

Most important for my purposes, it makes it clear
what's required and allowed by the standard.

No, that is not really true - the C standard is /not/ clear on all points.  There are aspects of the language that you cannot fully understand without cross-referencing between many different sections (and there are a few aspects that are not clear even then).  That is because it is a standard, not a tutorial, and not a language reference. A standard is written in more "legalise" language, and makes a point of trying to avoid repeating itself - while a good reference will repeat the same information multiple times in different places, whenever it helps for clarity.

 To be honest, I was also inspecting and reading language standards
(e.g. for the POSIX shell and awk), but not to be able to correctly
write programs in those languages, but rather out of interest and
for academical discussions in Usenet (like the discussions here,
that also often refer to the "C" standard).
 

For most of my career, I
worked under rules that required my code to avoid undefined behavior, to
work correctly regardless of which choice implementations make on
unspecified behavior, with a few exceptions.

 Janis