Re: [trinity-users] Slightly OT: The Thompson-Davis Editor

On 06/09/2018 10:16 PM, Leslie Turriff wrote: Leslie, If you truly want to learn C, and you are looking for editors, you have two basic classes of editors you can use (both more than capable). Your choices are either traditional text-console/curses based (e.g. vim, emacs and what sounds like Thompson-Davis is), or you have your ui-toolkit based editors like kate, kwrite, geany (https://github.com/geany/geany) or codeblocks (http://www.codeblocks.org/downloads). Of the two, I prefer the ui-toolkit based editors, but I'm at home with vim as well. In the ui category -- you really cannot do better than kate/kwrite (and if you aren't smart enough to use TDE, then a geany or codeblocks work well). For the text/curses based class, it's a preferences thing. vim, or emacs are both incredibly capable, though I find emacs a bit heavier than vim. Learning C is one of the best choices you can make. Nothing else (aside from assembly) provides you the complete control over hardware as C does. However, working at the hardware level comes with great responsibility. You are responsible for memory management. One-byte too few and you walk off into the realm of Undefined Behavior. Leaning C, you learn to program and will be a better programmer as a result, regardless of which language you ultimately end up writing in. The best advice anyone can give you in learning C is simply to slow-down. C is an exact language. Understand every declaration, the proper use of each library function and for God sake validate the return of every allocation and every I/O call. You don't digest the whole library at once. When you use a library function, open the man page -- read it -- pay careful attention to all parameter type, return types and the RETURN section of the page. (pay particular attention to the man page for the scanf family -- which provides no end of pitfall for the new C programmer who fails to learn the distinction between a *matching* and *input* failure and fails to understand that when either occur, no further characters are extracted from the input stream and are left unread -- just waiting to bite you on your next call) When you are learning, forget an IDE, build your code on the command line so you actually learn what the compiler option are and how to correctly use them -- then you can properly use an IDE. Until you understand how to compile and link your code -- there is no way you can tell an IDE how to do it. *Always* compile with *warnings enabled* and do not accept code until it compile cleanly, without warning. For gcc/clang that means adding -Wall -Wextra -pedantic (and I would add -Wshadow) to your command line. (clang also provides -Weverything). If you hop on a windoze box, the for VS (cl.exe) use /W3 (/Wall provides a great deal of non-code specific warnings that are a bit much). Finally, go get an account on StackOverflow.com -- seriously. If you have a C question -- it has probably already be answered 50 times over, and the answer peer-reviewed. (the same applies for just about any language, it is a fantastic site) Before you post a question you are expected to have searched for a similar one and taken the http://stackoverflow.com/tour, visited http://stackoverflow.com/questions/how-to-ask and when posting always provide a http://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve (a minimal, complete and verifiable example -- meaning something those there can compile to verify your code behavior and help debug) Learning C isn't something your do in a day, or a week, or month, or year -- it is a journey -- enjoy the ride. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.