What should a C programmer know?
Knowledge Requirements for a C Programmer
C is the basic of all programming languages. Before the introduction of C we had only Machine level languages. Once you have mastered C, you can learn other programming language with ease. Our opinion, Aside from standard constructs common to most procedural languages, C Programmer should have the following knowledge:
– (ab)using the preprocessor;
– Function pointers;
– Why sprintf can blow your foot off;
– Unions;
– Thinking about development in terms of modules (.h/.c files) with a set of publicly exposed functions instead of strictly classes;
– inker vs compiler;
– How arrays are pointers are arrays;
– Pointers Pointers Pointers;
– Pointer aliasing, (why its illegal in C99);
– Stack vs Heap;
– Manual memory management malloc/free;
– ow to cast anything to anything (its all just 1s and 0s after all;
– How bad C string use can result in buffer overflows;
– How C strings work, and how they are also pointers and arrays;
– x >> 1 is equivalent to x/2 for unsigned integers;
– Bit masks are your friend;
– Pointer arithmetic;
– Frequent small memory allocations can cause fragmentation on the heap;
– malloc and/or calloc can return NULL…make sure your check return values;
– GOTO is not evil especially when used to handle exceptions/failures;
– nitialize everything to a known value;
– Integer promotion rules.
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