Is C worth the effort? Post: 302905299

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Top Forums Programming Is C worth the effort? Post 302905299 by bakunin on Tuesday 10th of June 2014 07:25:16 PM

06-10-2014

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Every programming language is an abstraction layer between the bare machine and the human thought process. In some languages this layer is thicker than in others: in Assembler it is very thin (almost nonexistent) and in highly abstracted languages like Oberon it is very thick.

Both these concepts have up- and downsides: the thinner the abstraction layer is the more you are in contact with the real workings of the system. You have more to do and more things to observe but get to utilize the machine to its fullest capacity. The thicker this layer is the less you have to observe and the less you have to know about the real machine as you work against an abstracted (and simplified) concept of the system, but on the other hand the less efficient your code will be. All programming languages are tradeoffs in this respect (and some other areas).

The last 50 years saw a whole lot of programming paradigms: structured programming, object orientation, data-centered programming, and whatnot. Basically, all these paradigms are ways to help the programmer keep his code as organized and understandable (=> maintainable) as possible. There are good reasons to employ any of them and good reasons why to avoid them. For every paradigm i could write a demo program where it looks bad and another where it seems the natural thing to do.

Do the sensible thing: learn to program with an emphasis on algorithms, not on programming methods. It is like with (human) languages: if you know how to organize your thoughts well and how to express what you mean without any margin of error you will be able to transport that capability into any language, regardless how little you speak it. But if you know five different languages but have difficulties phrasing a simple fact your communication attempts will fail in any language.

It is not very popular nowadays, but i even suggest to start learning Assembler before anything else: only knowing in-depth how a system works will let you appreciated what a compiler does for you and knowing how to program in a structured language (C) will make you appreciate what a C++-compiler does in addition to a C-compiler once you switch from C to C++. There is a reason why Donald Knuth (my personal programming hero) developed his own virtual Assembly language for a hypothetical system for his book "The Art of Computer Programming".

I hope this helps.

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

mixal

MIXAL(1)							Mixal user's manual							  MIXAL(1)

NAME

       mixal - a load-and-go MIX assembler

SYNOPSIS

       mixal [ file ...  ]

DESCRIPTION

       Mixal  is  an  implementation of the hypothetical MIX computer and its assembly language called MIXAL.  The computer was designed by Donald
       Knuth for use in his monumental and yet to be finished book series The Art of Computer Programming.  All programs and all programming exer-
       cises in the book are written in the MIXAL language.

       This  implementation  is  a  load-and-go  assembler,  meaning that you provide it with a MIXAL program source, which it translates into MIX
       machine code, which it promptly executes by acting as a MIX emulator.

       You give Mixal zero or more program source files in the command line, which the program interprets.   If  you  give  it	no  arguments,	it
       expects	to  find  a  program  in  the standard input stream.  After the program has executed, the final state of the machine registers are
       printed to the standard output stream.

       The card punch and line printer devices are connected to the standard input and output stream, respectively.  Console input and output  are
       connected  to  standard	input and output, and the disk devices are connected to files named diskN in the current directory, where N is the
       device number.  Those files are created on demand.

BUGS

       This MIXAL implementation does not do floating-point.  The tape devices are not implemented.

AUTHOR

       This MIXAL implementation was designed and written by Darius Bacon, and then ported to Unixish systems and debugged  by	Eric  S.  Raymond.
       This  version includes corrections to multiplication and division by Larry Gately.  This manual page was written for Debian by Antti-Juhani
       Kaijanaho, with changes by Darius Bacon.

SEE ALSO

       The files /usr/share/doc/mixal/READ.ME and /usr/share/doc/mixal/NOTES.gz contain some information about this MIXAL implementation.  Be sure
       to read /usr/share/doc/mixal/README.Debian, too.

       A  description  of  the MIX system and the MIXAL language can be found in Donald E. Knuth's book The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1:
       Fundamental   Algorithms;   3rd	 Edition   (Addison-Wesley   1997).    (Or   see   the	 home	 page	 at    http://www-cs-faculty.stan-
       ford.edu/%7Eknuth/taocp.html.)

Debian project							    18 May 2003 							  MIXAL(1)