[gameprogrammer] A Note on C Programming Style

Hi,

Here is a small rant on C programming style from my blog, that some
beginners might find useful:

--

 It is widely believe that pointers are a difficult area in C
programming. Joel on Software mentions it in his hiring essay, for
example. However, I do not think that they are that hard to
understand. They are, after all, just variables that contain memory
addresses.

I do think that C convention does confuse the issue though. For
example, most people when they create pointer variables do so like
this:

  char *p;

which means character pointer p. However, everyplace else variables
are defined it is:

  type variablename;

That is type space variablename. In the above example, it looks like
the variable name is *p, but it is not, it is just p.

This gets especially confusing when using the unary operator (*) to
de-refrence the variable, which is, of course, quite common. The
important point is that *p in a variable definition is quite different
than *p in logic code.

For this reason, I believe it would be better to write pointer definitions:

  char* p;

Note that the space is now between the * and the pointer name, and
also that the change has no effect on the code itself.

I know this is a small point, but this seems to me to be a clearer
definition of a character pointer named p, and also makes it is
clearer what *p means, that it is different from the pointer named p.

Chris

--=20
E-Mail: Chris Nystrom <cnystrom@xxxxxxxxx>
Business: http://www.shaklee.net/austin
Blog: http://conversazione.blogspot.com/
AIM: nystromchris


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