Expert C Programming · Deep Secrets by Linden, Peter van der -- Read -- Imperial Library of Trantor

Index

About This eBook Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Preface Acknowledgments Introduction

The $20 Million Bug Convention Some Light Relief—Tuning File Systems

1. C Through the Mists of Time

The Prehistory of C Early Experiences with C The Standard I/O Library and C Preprocessor K&R C The Present Day: ANSI C It’s Nice, but Is It Standard? Translation Limits The Structure of the ANSI C Standard Reading the ANSI C Standard for Fun, Pleasure, and Profit How Quiet is a “Quiet Change”? Some Light Relief—The Implementation-Defined Effects of Pragmas . . .

2. It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Language Feature

Why Language Features Matter—The Way the Fortran Bug Really Happened! Sins of Commission Sins of Mission Sins of Omission Some Light Relief—Some Features Really Are Bugs!

3. Unscrambling Declarations in C

Syntax Only a Compiler Could Love How a Declaration Is Formed The Precedence Rule Unscrambling C Declarations by Diagram typedef Can Be Your Friend Difference Between typedef int x[10] and #define x int[10] What typedef struct foo { ... foo; } foo; Means The Piece of Code that Understandeth All Parsing Some Light Relief—Software to Bite the Wax Tadpole...

4. The Shocking Truth: C Arrays and Pointers Are NOT the Same!

Arrays Are NOT Pointers! Why Doesn’t My Code Work? What’s a Declaration? What’s a Definition? How Arrays and Pointers Are Accessed Diagram A A Subscripted Array Reference Diagram B A Pointer Reference Diagram C A Subscripted Pointer Reference Match Your Declarations to the Definition Other Differences Between Arrays and Pointers Some Light Relief—Fun with Palindromes!

5. Thinking of Linking

Libraries, Linking, and Loading The Benefits of Dynamic Linking Five Special Secrets of Linking with Libraries Watch Out for Interpositioning Generating Linker Report Files Some Light Relief—Look Who’s Talking: Challenging the Turing Test

6. Poetry in Motion: Runtime Data Structures

a.out and a.out Folklore Segments What the OS Does with Your a.out What the C Runtime Does with Your a.out What Happens When a Function Gets Called: The Procedure Activation Record The auto and static keywords Threads of Control setjmp and longjmp The Stack Segment Under UNIX The Stack Segment Under MS-DOS Helpful C Tools Some Light Relief—Programming Puzzles at CMU For Advanced Students Only

7. Thanks for the Memory

The Intel 80x86 Family The Intel 80x86 Memory Model and How It Got That Way Virtual Memory Cache Memory The Data Segment and Heap Memory Leaks Bus Error, Take the Train Some Light Relief—The Thing King and the Paging Game

8. Why Programmers Can’t Tell Halloween from Christmas Day

The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures Making a Glyph from Bit Patterns Types Changed While You Wait Prototype Painfulness Getting a Char Without a Carriage Return Implementing a Finite State Machine in C Software Is Harder than Hardware! How and Why to Cast Some Light Relief—The International Obfuscated C Code Competition

9. More about Arrays

When an Array Is a Pointer Why the Confusion? Why C Treats Array Parameters as Pointers Indexing a Slice Arrays and Pointers Interchangeability Summary C Has Multidimensional Arrays... ...But Every Other Language Calls Them “Arrays of Arrays” How Multidimensional Arrays Break into Components How Arrays Are Laid Out in Memory How to Initialize Arrays Some Light Relief—Hardware/Software Trade-Offs

10. More About Pointers

The Layout of Multidimensional Arrays An Array of Pointers Is an “Iliffe Vector” Using Pointers for Ragged Arrays Passing a One-Dimensional Array to a Function Using Pointers to Pass a Multidimensional Array to a Function Using Pointers to Return an Array from a Function Using Pointers to Create and Use Dynamic Arrays Some Light Relief—The Limitations of Program Proofs

11. You Know C, So C++ is Easy!

Allez-OOP! Abstraction—Extracting Out the Essential Characteristics of a Thing Encapsulation—Grouping Together Related Types, Data, and Functions Showing Some Class—Giving User-Defined Types the Same Privileges as Predefined Types Availability Declarations How to Call a Method Inheritance—Reusing Operations that Are Already Defined Multiple Inheritance—Deriving from Two or More Base Classes Overloading—Having One Name for the Same Action on Different Types How C++ Does Operator Overloading Input/Output in C++ Polymorphism—Runtime Binding Explanation How C++ Does Polymorphism Fancy Pants Polymorphism Other Corners of C++ If I Was Going There, I Wouldn’t Start from Here It May Be Crufty, but It’s the Only Game in Town Some Light Relief—The Dead Computers Society Some Final Light Relief—Your Certificate of Merit! Further Reading

Appendix: Secrets of Programmer Job Interviews

Index