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On 16/12/10 11:21, Gordon Henderson wrote:
C was easy - so is C++, what can be hard is working out what is going on with it - the simple stuff you find in K&R is simple stuff. The trouble with a lot of the C++ libraries is you cant 'explain' them in a couple of lines of code, you need a realistic life like example as they often depend on the interaction of many objects and states and an explanation of the reasoning behind the presence of certain bits of code: I've been coding in C++ off and on for 20 years and I only came across the problem of self-assignment a few days ago, never come near it in probably 50-100k lines of code! A lot of these libraries fix problems like that - real problems but not the sort of thing that's immediately obvious as to why its a problem. Once I know why there's a problem the solution becomes a solution and not some weird quirky way of doing something in 10 lines of code when I (think) could do it in 3. Or as they say - "You don't want to start from here!" Or perhaps more on the lines of 'yes that concrete looks pretty good with that mix' and its twenty years before the 20 story hotel falls down because no-one told you that there might be a risk of a car in the car park being torched, well no-one but old Geoff but we got rid of him because he kept pointing out flaws in the design.......I've no idea what Boost is, but I did learn C a long time ago - bit of a trial by fire as my first project was to fix some bugs and modify 'lpd' on an early Unix v6 system nearly 30 years ago...However I'd already done a lot of work in Pascal before that (as you did back then!) And FORTRAN, etc.You ought to have a copy of "K&R" for reference - probably the ANSI version, since even embedded compilers all support ANSI to some level these days.
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