Re: First-Time C

[weyrich!orville@uunet.uu.net (Orville R. Weyrich)]

In article <1993Jan11.210636.8396@gvl.unisys.com> garyp@rmtc.paramax.com (Gary 
Palangian [RMTC/ISP]) writes:
>
>    Our customer is probably going to make a decision to move from
>Ada to C on my project.  I am concerned about our ability to
>control the software engineering process, especially module integration,
>using C as a language.  Can anybody offer advice or a reference text
>that discusses large system development and the particular implementation
>and coordintation issues one should expect/plan for if C were the implementati
on
>language.

I learned [and taught Ada] before I learned [and taught C].

The ".h" files in C are pretty much like Ada package specifications,
and "static" is pretty much like "private".

Unfortunately, the C textbooks I deal with don't seem to have much sense
of programming in the large, and really do not give the sort of treatment
to how these features can be exploited as I would like.

Depending on the size of your project, it may be worth your while to acquire
or develop a tool to enforce certain standards, such as prohibiting any
global symbols from being present in a ".c" file that are not also in the
".h" file. Some compilers will warn you of such things, some not.
Make LINT a habit.

But if you are re-training Ada programmers to program in C, then you should
have a fairly easy time with this aspect. If you are using ANSI-C instead of
C++ you will probably miss things like overloading.

Hope this helps; I might think of more issues later.


orville

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