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From: Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Top 10 most common hard skills listed on resumes...
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2024 06:57:25 -0700
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Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> writes:

> On 01.09.2024 22:07, Tim Rentsch wrote:
>
>> [...]  The most important purpose of
>> the ISO C standard is to be read and understood by ordinary C
>> developers, not just compiler writers.  [...]
>
> Is that part of a preamble or rationale given in the C standard?
>
> That target audience would surely surprise me.  Myself I've
> programmed in quite some programming languages and never read a
> standard document of the respective language, nor did I yet met
> any programmer who have done so.  All programmer folks I know used
> text books to learn and look up things and specific documentation
> that comes with the compiler or interpreter products.  (This is of
> course just a personal experience.)
>
> I've also worked a lot with standards documents in various areas
> (mainly ISO and ITU-T standards but also some others). [..]

My comment is only about the C standard, not any other standards
documents.

> 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).

You're hearing something different than what I said.  The C standard
is not a tutorial, and I didn't say it is.  Of course the standard
is important to implementors, and I didn't say it isn't.  It's a
safe bet that most C developers are not familiar with the C standard
and I didn't say they were.  Despite all that, the most important
value of the C standard is that is available to, accessible to, and
can be read by, ordinary developers.  To see why that is, compare
the C standard to reference documents for other current programming
languages.  It is fairly easy to get a solid sense of exactly what
the C language allows and what it doesn't ("solid" being the key
word here).  That is not the case for many popular languages today.

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

The text books being imagined here don't exist, because there is no
market for them.  Very few developers read the C standard.  But the
impact and influence of those who do is much larger than the small
numbers would suggest.