On 08/01/11 17:58, Darren New wrote:
> On 8/1/2011 4:13, Lars R. wrote:
>> It is not surprising if you _know_ C.
>> i.o.w. if it is surprising for you, your C knowledge are incomplete. ^^
> 
> Sure. It's also surprising when your leg disappears, simply because
> while you know you're in a minefield, your knowledge of that minefield
> is incomplete.

ACK.

The spirit of C is: "trust the programmer" because the programmer knows
what (s)he does. If that premise is wrong, anything goes.

Ex falso sequitur quodlibet. :-D

> That doesn't mean it's a *good* thing. Yes, it can be surprising even to
> those who know C well enough to write an operating system kernel in it.

AFAIK most "kernel hackers" knows a lot about their topic, e.g. their
hardware, their data structures (file systems) and so on. But most of
them are not academic C language evangelists who can quote every
paragraph of the ISO C language standard.

> The whole "it's only surprising if you don't know it'll happen"
> tautology is silly. The problem is that composing two perfectly valid
> statements makes an invalid program that behaves completely differently
> than how you would expect from each of those two statements separately.

Crossing the street on foot is fine.
Driving on the streat by car is also fine.

But crossing the street while someone else is driving on can be
disastrous. :-)


L.

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