Rob Pike: Notes on Programming in C - The Diigo Meta page

• 11 May 08
  

  York Jong

  What follows is a set of short essays that collectively encourage a philosophy of clarity in programming rather than giving hard rules.

  C programming concept

  • Length is not a virtue in a name;
    clarity of expression is.
  • When the variable names are
    huge, it's harder to see what's going on.
  • 13 more annotations...
  • • As in all other aspects of readable programming,
      consistency is important in naming.
    • I prefer minimum­length but
      maximum­information names, and then let the context fill in the
      rest.  Globals, for instance, typically have little context
      when they are used, so their names need to be relatively
      evocative.  Thus I say maxphysaddr (not
MaximumPhysicalAddress) for a global variable, but np
      not NodePointer for a pointer locally defined and used
    • Stepping
      through structures using pointers can be much easier to read
      than with expressions: less ink is needed and less effort is
      expended by the compiler and computer.
    • if you find code containing many similar,
      complex expressions that evaluate to elements of a data
      structure, judicious use of pointers can clear things up.
    • Procedure names should reflect what they do; function
      names should reflect what they return.
    • If your code needs a comment to be
      understood, it would be better to rewrite it so it's easier
      to understand.
    • Most programs are too complicated - that is, more
      complex than they need to be to solve their problems
      efficiently.  Why? Mostly it's because of bad design
    • Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and
      n is usually small.
    • Use simple algorithms
      as well as simple data structures.
    • Data dominates.  If you've chosen the right
      data structures and organized things well, the algorithms
      will almost always be self­evident.  Data structures, not
      algorithms, are central to programming.
    • Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this kind of
      design is that the tables can sometimes be generated by
      another program - a parser generator, in the classical case.
      As a more earthy example, if an operating system is driven
      by a set of tables that connect I/O requests to the
      appropriate device drivers, the system may be `configured'
      by a program that reads a description of the particular
      devices connected to the machine in question and prints the
      corresponding tables.
    • Combining data­driven programs with function pointers
      leads to an astonishingly expressive way of working, a way
      that, in my experience, has often led to pleasant surprises.
      Even without a special O­O language, you can get 90% of the
      benefit for no extra work and be more in control of the
      result.
    • Simple rule: include files should never include include
      files.  If instead they state (in comments or implicitly)
      what files they need to have included first, the problem of
      deciding which files to include is pushed to the user
      (programmer) but in a way that's easy to handle and that, by
      construction, avoids multiple inclusions.
• 01 Apr 08
  

  Lcuas Fan

  c note or progamming

• 22 Mar 07
  

  Marc Ordinas i Llopis

  c programming

• 09 Jul 06
  

  craig hancock

  c code dev essay geek guide programming reference style tech tips unix

• 30 Jan 06
  

  Alex Lee

  c language

• 30 Dec 05
  

  Nick Gall

  From: Rob Pike: Notes on Programming in C. There's another reason that data dominates: in the context of the distinction between "code" and "data", data is simply the set of bits that we intend to frequently change, while code is the set of bits that do t

  Web Architecture - REST

  • Rule 5. Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self­evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming. (See Brooks p. 102.)
• 29 Jul 05
  

  chih yi huang

  Programming Cpp

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