C - Thu Feb 15

On hackernews today ... The cost of forsaking C | discussion

Nate Says

Interesting discussion, I'm liking the way c makes me think about programming but I'm having trouble finding good ways to practice. I wrote out a few basic sorting algorithms in c, spent awhile watching videos, visualizing them and staring at the code, then tried to wrap my mind around merge sort. I get the idea but I think I need to work with recursion a bit to really get what the code does. I think what I really need is just clear reasons and exercises to write more code.

Jim says

My first reaction to what you've submitted here is the same as what I've said to almost everything you've submitted:

• You are giving me code, when what I want is (a) code + docs and (b) output examples i.e. explicit tests.
• Every file should have a header at the top: what is this and what does it do.

Usually functions have (a) API docs i.e. inputs, outputs, and (b) implementation comments as needed. It's true that these are short fairly simple examples. But if you don't get into the habit of doing this stuff now, as your coding practice becomes ingrained, then people who you work with later - and you looking at your old code - will either do lots of extra work and/or end up starting from scratch rather than building on what you did before.

... I've uploaded C files that we worked on in class. Somewhat random but might be helpful reminders.

We talked about doing next something like

• Linked lists (see my word list for one example)
• Measuring run times for sorting routines for different sizes, i.e. plotting RunTime vs ArraySize ... the O(N) behavior of algorithms is an an important idea, and one we can measure with numerical experiments
• merge sort and recursion more generally (often used with linked lists)
• trees and graphs using pointers : balanced trees for example

While it isn't in C, this may be a good resource :

• http://interactivepython.org/runestone/static/pythonds/index.html
• ... maybe trying to do some of those things in C.

attachments

		last modified	size
	bubbleSort.c	Sun Dec 22 2024 05:12 am	592B
	insertion.c	Sun Dec 22 2024 05:12 am	542B
	jim_time.c	Sun Dec 22 2024 05:12 am	169B
	selection.c	Sun Dec 22 2024 05:12 am	656B