[SGVLUG] "Survival At C" Discussion Thread

[Jess Bermudes]

Dustin: For posterity, do you have the slides available online or at least
the link to the github repo? Additionally, are there any books or sources
for more reading of a fuller exposition/example of the principles you
outlined in the talk for those that want to see how it works in practice?

And coincidentally for the JPL crowd, a copy of the standards used by JPL
for specifically flight software was posted on reddit today and it appears
to be based on MISRA 2004 and explicitly forbids any use of gotos but does
seem to mention some of the ownership stuff discussed last night:

http://lars-lab.jpl.nasa.gov/JPL_Coding_Standard_C.pdf



On Fri, Jun 10, 2016 at 3:32 PM, Dustin Laurence <dllaurence at dslextreme.com>
wrote:

> The lively discussion after my talk may indicate that there might be
> interest in continuing the conversation/debate/outrage, so this is an
> open thread for discussion of anything at least vaguely related to my
> talk.  Ask/comment/criticize/bellow away. :-)
>
> I'm particularly interested in critiques and suggestions of the
> particular topics chosen--I could only fit in three topics, and one
> could certainly make a case that other topics should replace one or more
> of the ones I chose the next time I give it.  What was or was not useful
> to you, and what do you wish I'd covered?
>
> To kick it off, here are some responses to a couple of issues that came
> up last night, put together while drinking tea from my speaker's mug. :-)
>
> 1. Last night I was asked what to do when the C Exception Handling
> Pattern is forbidden by your coding standards.  That's an *excellent*
> question since a great many coding standards will flatly forbid it (e.g.
> MISRA 2004, though in the current version the prohibition is only
> advisory for *forward* gotos), and very often they are enforced without
> understanding of the principles standards are supposed to serve.  I need
> to address that in any talk that presents the pattern, and I'm grateful
> for having the flaw pointed out.
>
> I've run through a few different goto-free implementations and will
> offer the final ones for discussion ("Goto Reconsidered"?) on this thread.
>
> 2. Someone brought up the "Goto Considered Harmful Considered Harmful"
> response to Dijstra.  I looked it up and '"GOTO Considered Harmful"
> Considered Harmful' was not Knuth's article, but rather a long letter to
> the editor in Communications of the ACM":
>
>
> http://web.archive.org/web/20090320002214/http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/ParaMount/papers/rubin87goto.pdf
>
> Knuth's response was titled "Structured Programming with goto Statements":
>
> https://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~mak/CS185C/KnuthStructuredProgrammingGoTo.pdf
>
> Does interest in a thirty-year-old food fight constitute a sign of some
> kind of borderline personality disorder?  I hope not.
>
> Dustin
>
>
>
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