[aclug-L] c primer

[Tom Hull <thull@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

At the last ACLUG meeting, James G. asked for someone to do a presentation
on the C programming language. The general reaction seemed to be: not in one
night. I've been thinking about this, and I think I could throw together
something on a limited subset of C, specifically:

  -- object types and their memory representation
  -- type descriptors
  -- casts
  -- rvalues and lvalues
  -- array and pointer operations
  -- simple (non-bitfield) structures and unions

I suspect that when all is said and done, this material is the hardest
to grasp for people who do not have any low-level programming (aka,
assembly language) experience. It may also be useful for folks who
know a little C, but aren't totally clear on pointers and such.

For perspective, this would not include things like: preprocessor,
compilation units, scoping, functions, statements, expressions,
operator associativity and precedence, main(), the standard library,
linking, debugging, or anything on comparative languages, meta-
politics, etc. Merely understanding what I've outlined above would
not be sufficient for you to write and compile even a "hello world"
program. (You can in fact write "hello world" in total ignorance
of what I'm proposing, but you won't be able to write much else.)

My question is, would this be of sufficient general interest?

-- 
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 *  Tom Hull * thull@xxxxxxxxxxx * http://www.ocston.org/~thull/
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