this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
286 points (96.7% liked)
Programmer Humor
18969 readers
766 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Then again, at least in C, the mantra is "declaration follows usage". Surely you don't write pointer dereferences as
* ptr
? Most likely not, you most likely write it as*ptr
. The idea behind theint *ptr;
syntax is basically that when you do*ptr
, you get anint
.And with this idea, stuff like function pointers (
int (*f)(void)
), arrays of pointers (int *a[10]
) versus pointers of arrays (int (*a)[10]
) etc. start making sense. It's certainly not the best way to design the syntax, and I'm as much a fan of the Pascal-styled "type follows the identifier" syntax (e.g.let x: number;
) as anyone, but the C way does have a rhyme and a reason for the way it is.