By Henry Spencer
lint
frequently and study its
pronouncements with care, for verily its perception and judgement oft
exceed thine.This is still wise counsel, although many modern compilers search out
many of the same sins, and there are often problems with lint
being aged and infirm, or unavailable in strange lands. There are other
tools, such as Saber C, useful to similar ends. “Frequently”
means thou shouldst draw thy daily guidance from it, rather than hoping
thy code will achieve lint
’s blessing by a sudden act
of repentance at the last minute. De-lint
ing a program which
has never been lint
ed before is often a cleaning of the
stables such as thou wouldst not wish on thy worst enemies. Some observe,
also, that careful heed to the words of lint
can be quite
helpful in debugging. “Study” doth not mean mindless zeal to
eradicate every byte of lint
output — if for no other
reason, because thou just canst not shut it up about some things —
but that thou should know the cause of its unhappiness and understand what
worrisome sign it tries to speak of.
NULL
pointer, for chaos and
madness await thee at its end.Clearly the holy scriptures were mis-transcribed here, as the words
should have been “null pointer”, to minimize confusion between
the concept of null pointers and the macro NULL
(of which
more anon). Otherwise, the meaning is plain. A null pointer points to
regions filled with dragons, demons, core dumps, and numberless other foul
creatures, all of which delight in frolicking in thy program if thou
disturb their sleep. A null pointer doth not point to a 0 of any type,
despite some blasphemous old code which impiously assumes this.
A programmer should understand the type structure of his language, lest
great misfortune befall him. Contrary to the heresies espoused by some of
the dwellers on the Western Shore, “int
” and
“long
” are not the same type. The moment of
their equivalence in size and representation is short, and the agony that
awaits believers in their interchangeability shall last forever and ever
once 64-bit machines become common.
Also, contrary to the beliefs common among the more backward
inhabitants of the Polluted Eastern Marshes,
“NULL
” does not have a pointer type, and must be
cast to the correct type whenever it is used as a function argument. (The
words of the prophet ANSI, which permit NULL
to be defined as
having the type “void *
”, are oft taken out of
context and misunderstood. The prophet was granting a special
dispensation for use in cases of great hardship in wild lands. Verily, a
righteous program must make its own way through the Thicket Of Types
without lazily relying on this rarely-available dispensation to solve all
its problems. In any event, the great deity Dmr who created C hath wisely
endowed it with many types of pointers, not just one, and thus it would
still be necessary to convert the prophet’s NULL
to the
desired type).
It may be thought that the radical new blessing of “prototypes” might eliminate the need for caution about argument types. Not so, brethren. Firstly, when confronted with the twisted strangeness of variable numbers of arguments, the problem returns… and he who has not kept his faith strong by repeated practice shall surely fall to this subtle trap. Secondly, the wise men have observed that reliance on prototypes doth open many doors to strange errors, and some indeed had hoped that prototypes would be decreed for purposes of error checking but would not cause implicit conversions. Lastly, reliance on prototypes causeth great difficulty in the Real World today, when many cling to the old ways and the old compilers out of desire or necessity, and no man knoweth what machine his code may be asked to run on tomorrow.
The prophet ANSI, in her wisdom, hath added that thou shouldst also scourge thy Suppliers, and demand on pain of excommunication that they produce header files that declare their library functions. For truly, only they know the precise form of the incantation appropriate to invoking their magic in the optimal way. The prophet hath also commented that it is unwise, and leads one into the pits of damnation and subtle bugs, to attempt to declare such functions thyself when thy header files do the job right.
As demonstrated by the deeds of the Great Worm, a consequence of this
commandment is that robust production software should never make use of
gets()
, for it is truly a tool of the Devil. Thy interfaces
should always inform thy servants of the bounds of thy arrays, and
servants who spurn such advice or quietly fail to follow it should be
dispatched forthwith to the Land Of Rm, where they can do no further harm
to thee.
All true believers wish for a better error-handling mechanism, for explicit checks of return codes are tiresome in the extreme and the temptation to omit them is great. But until the far-off day of deliverance comes, one must walk the long and winding road with patience and care, for thy Vendor, thy Machine, and thy Software delight in surprises and think nothing of producing subtly meaningless results on the day before thy Thesis Oral or thy Big Pitch To The Client.
Occasionally, as with the ferror()
feature of
stdio
, it is possible to defer error checking until the end
when a cumulative result can be tested, and this often produceth code
which is shorter and clearer. Also, even the most zealous believer should
exercise some judgement when dealing with functions whose failure is
totally uninteresting… but beware, for the cast to void
is a two-edged sword that sheddeth thine own blood without remorse.
Numberless are the unwashed heathen who scorn their libraries on various silly and spurious grounds, such as blind worship of the Little Tin God (also known as “Efficiency”). While it is true that some features of the C libraries were ill-advised, by and large it is better and cheaper to use the works of others than to persist in re-inventing the square wheel. But thou should take the greatest of care to understand what thy libraries promise, and what they do not, lest thou rely on facilities that may vanish from under thy feet in future.
These words, alas, have caused some uncertainty among the novices and the converts, who knoweth not the ancient wisdoms. The One True Brace Style referred to is that demonstrated in the writings of the First Prophets, Kernighan and Ritchie. Often and again it is criticized by the ignorant as hard to use, when in truth it is merely somewhat difficult to learn, and thereafter is wonderfully clear and obvious, if perhaps a bit sensitive to mistakes.
While thou might think that thine own ideas of brace style lead to clearer programs, thy successors will not thank thee for it, but rather shall revile thy works and curse thy name, and word of this might get to thy next employer. Many customs in this life persist because they ease friction and promote productivity as a result of universal agreement, and whether they are precisely the optimal choices is much less important. So it is with brace style.
As a lamentable side issue, there has been some unrest from the fanatics of the Pronoun Gestapo over the use of the word “man” in this Commandment, for they believe that great efforts and loud shouting devoted to the ritual purification of the language will somehow rebound to the benefit of the downtrodden (whose real and grievous woes tendeth to get lost amidst all that thunder and fury). When preaching the gospel to the narrow of mind and short of temper, the word “creature” may be substituted as a suitable pseudoBiblical term free of the taint of Political Incorrectness.
Though some hasty zealots cry “Not so; the Millenium is come, and this saying is obsolete and no longer need be supported”, verily there be many, many ancient systems in the world, and it is the decree of the dreaded god Murphy that thy next employment just might be on one. While thou sleepest, he plotteth against thee. Awake and take care.
It is, note carefully, not necessary that thy identifiers be limited to a length of six characters. The only requirement that the holy words place upon thee is uniqueness within the first six. This often is not so hard as the belittlers claim.
This particular heresy bids fair to be replaced by “All the world’s a Sun” or “All the world’s a 386” (this latter being a particularly revolting invention of Satan), but the words apply to all such without limitation. Beware, in particular, of the subtle and terrible “All the world’s a 32-bit machine”, which is almost true today but shall cease to be so before thy resumé grows too much longer.