On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 2:48 PM, David VanHorn <address@hidden> wrote:
I thought I must be doing something fairly trivial wrong, this IS
only my second project in C...
Dave, I have two recommendations for a beginner at C.
1) Buy yourself a copy of Gimpel Lint, even if you have to pay
for it out of your own pocket, it will be money well spent in the long
run. http://www.gimpel.com/ . It will be the best C tutor
you could have. When you run your first piece of code through
it you will be appalled at the number errors it finds. Not because
you are a beginner, tho that might help, it is because in C it is
so easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Alas there are few alternative
languages for dealing at the bare metal level.
Also you can learn a lot just by reading Gimpel's Bug of the Month:
http://www.gimpel.com/html/bugs.htm
2) Get yourself a copy of the MISRA guidelines:
http://www.misra-c2.com/
Right now someone on the list is reading that and saying
"Say what? Recommending MISRA to a new C Programmer?".
Yes. Even if you don't try to write your code to MISRA, the explanation
of the rules, ie. the landmines you don't want to step on will be beneficial
to your C education.