1．C Through the Mists of Time 1
The Prehistory of C 1
Early Experiences with C 4
The Standard I/O Library and C Preprocessor 6
K&R C 9
The Present Day:ANSI C 11
It's Nice,but Is It Standard? 14
Translation Limits 16
The Structure of the ANSI C Standard 17
Reading the ANSI C Standard for Fun,Pleasure,and Profit 22
How Quiet is a"Quiet Change"? 25
Some Light Relief—The Implementation-Defined Effects of Pragmas... 29
2．It's Not a Bug,It's a Language Feature 31
Why Language Features Matter—The Way the Fortran Bug Really Happened! 31
Sins of Commission 33
Switches Let You Down with Fall Through 33
Available Hardware Is a Crayon? 39
Too Much Default Visibility 41
Sins of Mission 42
Overloading the Camel's Back 42
"Some of the Operators Have the Wrong Precedence" 44
The Early Bug gets() the Internet Worm 48
Sins of Omission 50
Mail Won't Go to Users with an"f"in Their Usernames 50
Space—The Final Frontier 53
A Digression into C+++ Comments 55
The Compiler Date Is Corrupted 55
Lint Should Never Have Been Separated Out 59
Some Light Relief—Some Features Really Are Bugs! 60
References 62
3．Unscrambling Declarations in C 63
Syntax Only a Compiler Could Love 64
How a Declaration Is Formed 66
A Word About structs 68
A Word About unions 71
A Word About enums 73
The Precedence Rule 74
Unscrambling C Declarations by Diagram 75
typedef Can Be Your Friend 78
Difference Between typedef int x[10]and #define x int[10] 80
What typedef struct foo{...foo}foo;Means 81
The Piece of Code that Understandeth All Parsing 83
Further Reading 86
Some Light Relief—Software to Bite the Wax Tadpole... 86
4．The Shocking Truth:C Arrays and Pointers Are NOT the Same! 95
Arrays Are NOT Pointers! 95
Why Doesn't My Code Work? 96
What's a Declaration? What's a Definition? 97
How Arrays and Pointers Are Accessed 98
What Happens When You"Define as Array/Declare as Pointer" 101
Match Your Declarations to the Definition 102
Other Differences Between Arrays and Pointers 103
Some Light Relief—Fun with Palindromes! 105
5．Thinking of Linking 109
Libraries,Linking,and Loading 110
Where the Linker Is in the Phases of Compilation 110
The Benefits of Dynamic Linking 113
Five Special Secrets of Linking with Libraries 118
Watch Out for Interpositioning 123
Generating Linker Report Files 128
Some Light Relief—Look Who's Talking:Challenging the Turing Test 129
Eliza 130
Eliza Meets the VP 130
Doctor,Meet Doctor 131
The Prize in Boston 133
Conclusions 133
Postscript 135
Further Reading 135
6．Poetry in Motion:Runtime Data Structures 137
a.out and a.out Folklore 138
Segments 139
What the OS Does with Your a.out 142
What the C Runtime Does with Your a.out 145
The Stack Segment 145
What Happens When a Function Gets Called:The Procedure Activation Record 146
The auto and static keywords 151
A Stack Frame Might Not Be on the Stack 152
Threads of Control 152
setjmp and longjmp 153
The Stack Segment Under UNIX 155
The Stack Segment Under MS-DOS 156
Helpful C Tools 156
Some Light Relief—Programming Puzzles at Princeton 161
For Advanced Students Only 163
7．Thanks for the Memory 165
The Intel 80x86 Family 165
The Intel 808x6 Memory Model and How It Got That Way 170
Virtual Memory 174
Cache Memory 177
The Data Segment and Heap 181
Memory Leaks 183
How to Check for a Memory Leak 184
Bus Error,Take the Train 187
Bus Error 188
Segmentation Fault 189
Some Light Relief—The Thing King and the Paging Game 195
8．Why Programmers Can't Tell Halloween from Christmas Day 201
The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures 201
Making a Glyph from Bit Patterns 203
Types Changed While You Wait 205
Prototype Painfulness 207
Where Prototypes Break Down 209
Getting a Char Without a Carriage Return 212
Implementing a Finite State Machine in C 217
Software Is Harder than Hardware! 219
How and Why to Cast 223
Some Light Relief—The International Obfuscated C Code Competition 225
9．More about Arrays 239
When an Array Is a Pointer 239
Why the Confusion? 240
Rule 1:An"Array Name in an Expression"Is a Pointer 243
Rule 2:C Treats Array Subscripts as Pointer Offsets 244
Rule 3:An"Array Name as a Function Parameter"Is a Pointer 246
Why C Treats Array Parameters as Pointers 246
How an Array Parameter Is Referenced 247
Indexing a Slice 250
Arrays and Pointers Interchangeability Summary 251
C Has Multidimensional Arrays... 251
...But Every Other Language Calls Them"Arrays of Arrays" 251
How Multidimensional Arrays Break into Components 254
How Arrays Are Laid Out in Memory 256
How to Initialize Arrays 257
Some Light Relief—Hardware/Software Trade-Offs 260
10．More About Pointers 263
The Layout of Multidimensional Arrays 263
An Array of Pointers Is an"Illiffe Vector" 265
Using Pointers for Ragged Arrays 269
Passing a One-Dimensional Array to a Function 273
Using Pointers to Pass a Multidimensional Array to a Function 273
Attempt 2 275
Attempt 3 276
Attempt 4 277
Using Pointers to Return an Array from a Function 277
Using Pointers to Create and Use Dynamic Arrays 280
Some Light Relief—The Limitations of Program Proofs 287
Further Reading 291
11．You Know C.So C++ is Easy！ 293
Allez-OOP! 293
Abstraction—Extracting Out the Essential Characteristics of a Thing 296
Encapsulation—Grouping Together Related Types,Data,and Functions 298
Showing Some Class—Giving User-Defined Types the Same Privileges as Predefined Types 299
Availability 301
Declarations 301
How to Call a Method 304
Constructors and Destructors 305
Inheritance—Reusing Operations that Are Already Defined 307
Multiple Inheritance—Deriving from Two or More Base Classes 311
Overloading—Having One Name for the Same Action on Different Types 312
How C+++ Does Operator Overloading 313
Input/Output in C+++ 314
Polymorphism—Runtime Binding 315
Explanation 317
How C+++ Does Polymorphism 318
Fancy Pants Polymorphism 319
Other Corners of C+++ 320
If I Was Going There,I Wouldn't Start from Here 322
It May Be Crufty,but It's the Only Game in Town 325
Some Light Relief—The Dead Computers Society 328
Some Final Light Relief—Your Certificate of Merit! 330
Further Reading 331
Appendix:Secrets of Programmer Job Interviews 333
Silicon Valley Programmer Interviews 333
How Can You Detect a Cycle in a Linked List? 334
What Are the Different C Increment Statements For? 335
How Is a Library Call Different from a System Call? 338
How Is a File Descriptor Different from a File Pointer? 340
Write Some Code to Determine if a Variable Is Signed or Not 341
What Is the Time Complexity of Printing the Values in a Binary Tree? 342
Give Me a String at Random from This File 343
Some Light Relief—How to Measure a Building with a Barometer 344
Further Reading 346
Index 349