Can anyone recomend a good intoduction to C...

[Alex Martelli]

"Erik Max Francis" <max at alcyone.com> wrote in message
news:3AAAE0BB.CBCC99EC at alcyone.com...
> Alex Martelli wrote:
>
> > It's no doubt possible that gcc has significantly worsened in the
> > last 5 or 6 years, but I'll confess that would really surprise me.
>
> No, it's actually gotten far better.  The pre-egcs versions of g++ had
> some really glaringly seriously problems with modern draft Standard (now
> actual Standard) compliance like exceptions, templates and the like.  If
> you weren't using these, though, g++ was just fine (which was probably
> the case for you).

Yes, this was before the Standard appeared, so we were not using
many of the Standard features -- templates being the only exception,
as it was obvious they bought us SO much it was worth taking a lot
of pain to use them.  (And it was indeed a lot:-).

> Note that modern version of egcs have all the
> Standard language _features_ all settled out, but there are a few
> Standard compliance problems in the library.  These are scheduled to be
> fixed in gcc 3.0.

One option we considered at one point was to purchase a library
somewhere (e.g., dinkumware) and use it instead of the one that
came with gcc.  Didn't pan out since we ended up on Windows
anyway, but early tests were promising.


Alex