Re: C coding

Learning C is indeed not like breathing, but as soon as you know
how to master it, writing is as easy as breathing.

Speaking as a mixed-language programmer who is (or at one time was)
fluent in several dialects of BASIC, QBASIC, and FORTRAN, as well as Pascal, PL/I, COBOL, Java, RPG, and C, not to mention MI, and the Assembler languages of the PDP/11 and the 8086, I can say that everything Buck said in response to the above is true. With my Assembler and MI experience, I have been "closer to the bare iron" than most C programmers ever get, and with my PL/I, Java, and QBASIC experience, I've also been far more abstracted from it than most RPG programmers get.

The thing I find the most uncomfortable about C is that it, while maintainng the appearances of a true HLL, takes one close enough to the "bare iron" to easily get you into trouble, but not necessarily close enough to get you out of it. (Of course, I've recently learned that the same can also be said of calling Java from ILE RPG [which is an order of magnitude closer to the iron than Java gets], but that is neither here nor there). Or, put another way, C gives you enough rope to hang yourself (yes, even on an IBM Midrange system; in fact, I'd say that it's probably easier to unwittingly circumvent the safeguards on an AS/400 from C than from MI), and while it doesn't actually help you tie the knot, it does make it very easy to do so without realizing it.

(MI, being "the assembler language of a virtual machine," is in many ways the converse of C: it has the look and feel of an assembler, while maintaining most of the traditional HLL abstractions and safeguards.)

At any rate, if you only know (or use) one language, it's as if the only item in your toolbox is a hammer: every problem in the world ends up looking like a nail.

--
JHHL