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From: Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Top 10 most common hard skills listed on resumes...
Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2024 16:37:05 +0200
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On 08.09.2024 16:12, James Kuyper wrote:
> On 9/8/24 00:39, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
> ...
>> 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). ...
> 
> I agree - the most important purpose is for implementors, not developers.
> 
>> ... I mean, what will a programmer get from the
>> "C" standard that a well written text book doesn't provide?
> 
> What the C standard says is more precise and more complete than what
> most textbooks say.

Exactly. And this precision is what makes standard often difficult
to read (for programming purposes for "ordinary" folks).

If a textbook doesn't answer a question I have I'd switch to another
(better) textbook, (usually) not to the standard.

> Most important for my purposes, it makes it clear
> what's required and allowed by the standard.

To be honest, I was also inspecting and reading language standards
(e.g. for the POSIX shell and awk), but not to be able to correctly
write programs in those languages, but rather out of interest and
for academical discussions in Usenet (like the discussions here,
that also often refer to the "C" standard).

> For most of my career, I
> worked under rules that required my code to avoid undefined behavior, to
> work correctly regardless of which choice implementations make on
> unspecified behavior, with a few exceptions.

Janis