Re: Attractive comments better?

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <37du0k$ir2@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>, Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:

>Note that I am perfectly aware that some C/C++ programmers fully understand
>the structural importance of headers, but a distressing amount of code, even
>on large systems, is written without this awareness, and the headers are
>an uncommented mess.

And an amazing number of C books do not even take cognizance of the
notion that a header file can be used for this purpose (equivalent
to an Ada spec). I went shopping for intro C books recently, to find
one I could use in my file structures course, in which I'm easing the
students from Ada to "C with an Ada accent".

I had 4 main criteria for a book, which narrowed the search from _hundreds_
(in the Computer Literacy Bookshop) to just a very few:

1. diskette of programs, and (better) a compiler shrink-wrapped;
2. suitable for self-teaching (I'm not going to teach C ab initio,
   because the students have had 2.5 semesters of Ada and some
   assembler already;
3. did justice to files, especially binary ones;
4. used headers adequately

It was _very_ tough to find one. In the end, 3 and 4 got lower priority
than 1 and 2. But looking at all the junk books on the market, one can
easily see where all the junk code comes from.

>Now of course people could write similar useless messy Ada specs, but both
>the language and the culture emphasize the importance of specs so
>energetically that this is relatively unusual in the Ada world.
>

And the C culture, in general, emphasizes it very little.

Mike Feldman
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Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5919 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)
"Non illegitimi carborundum." (Don't let the bastards grind you down.)
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