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From: Bart <bc@freeuk.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: question about linker
Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2024 01:20:17 +0000
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On 06/12/2024 00:50, Keith Thompson wrote:
> Bart <bc@freeuk.com> writes:
> [...]
>> This is a discussion of language design. Not one person trying to
>> understand how some feature works. I could learn how X works, but that
>> won't help a million others with the same issue.
> 
> That's great, if there are a million other users who are confused
> about the same things you claim to be confused about, and if you're
> actually trying to help them.
> 
> Except for a couple of things.
> 
> I don't believe there are "a million other users" who are confused
> about, to use a recent example, C's rules about whether a "}" needs
> to be followed by a semicolon.  I've seen code with extraneous
> semicolons at file scope, and I mostly blame gcc's lax default
> behavior for that.  But I've never heard anyone other than you
> complain about C's rules being intolerably inconsistent.
> 
> And even if those users exist, I don't see you making any effort
> to help them, for example by explaining how C actually works.
> (Though you do manage to provoke some of us into doing that for you.)
> 

You really think I'm a beginner stumped on some vital question of 
whether I should or should not have use a semicolon in a program I'm 
writing?

I said I wouldn't be able explain the rules. Otherwise I stumble along 
like everyone else.

If I catch sight of this at the top of my screen window:

    -------------------------
        }

        ....

is that } ending some compound statement, or is it missing a ";" because 
it's initialising some data? Or (if I know I'm outside a function), is 
it the end of function definition?

I wouldn't be stumped for long, but it strikes me as odd that you can't 
tell just by looking.

I used to be puzzled by this too: 'while' can both start a while 
statement, and it can delimit a do-while statement. How is that possible?

Again if you only caught a glimpse like this:

    ----------------
      while (cond);

then /probably/ it is the last line of a do-while, but it could also 
legally be a while loop with an empty body. (Maybe temporarily empty, or 
the ; is a mistake.)

How about this:

    do
    {
        ....
    }
    while cond();

A do-while, but comment out the 'do', and it's a compound statement 
followed by a while loop

This duality of 'while' bothers me.

(I can't have repeat-while in my syntax because it doesn't work; 'while' 
is always the start of a new while-loop. So I'm interested in how C 
manages it. But it looks fragile.)