This book contains a detailed analysis of the International Standard for the C language, excluding the library from a number of perspectives. The organization of the material is unusual in that it is based on the actual text of the published C Standard. The unit of discussion is the individual sentences from the C Standard (2022 of them).

Free Ebook C, The New C Standard--An Economic and Cultural Commentary.pdf by Derek M. Jones

Coding Guidelines

Writing coding guidelines is a very common activity. Whether these guidelines provide any benefit other than satisfying the itch that caused their author to write them is debatable. My own itch scratchings are based on having made a living, since 1991, selling tools that provide information to developers about possible problems in C source code.

The prime motivating factor for these coding guidelines subsections is money (other coding guideline documents often use technical considerations to label particular coding constructs or practices as good or bad). The specific monetary aspect of software of interest to me is reducing the cost of source code ownership. Given that most of this cost is the salary of the people employed to work on it, the performance characteristics of human information processing is the prime consideration.

Software developer interaction with source code occurs over a variety of timescales. My own interests and professional experience primarily deals with interactions whose timescale are measured in seconds. For this reason these coding guidelines discuss issues that are of importance over this timescale. While interactions that occur over longer timescales (e.g., interpersonal interaction) are important, they are not the primary focus of these coding guideline subsections. The study of human information processing, within the timescale of interest, largely falls within the field of cognitive psychology and an attempt has been made to underpin the discussion with the results of studies performed by researchers in this field............more

The study of software engineering has yet to outgrow the mathematical roots from which it originated. Belief in the mathematical approach has resulted in a research culture where performing experiments is considered to be unimportant and every attempt is made to remove human characteristics from consideration. Industry's insatiable demand for software developers has helped maintain the academic status quo by attracting talented individuals with the appropriate skills away from academia. The end result is that most of the existing academic software engineering research is of low quality and suffers from the problem of being carried out by people who don't have the ability to be mathematicians or the common sense to be practicing software engineers. For this reason the results of this research have generally been ignored

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