Year: 2019

I've spent a horribly long time tonight staring at nested stack manipulation code now to get algebraic expression parsing (mostly?) working. I hate unary minus; life is pretty good except for that ugly little weiner with its binary operator twin, and then BAM weird compromises in your code.

For most errors, I rely on testing (even if just firing a test script through the language, as I'm doing with tbasic) and debug mode with verbose stderr logging. But this is C, where the slightest mistake can be EXC_BAD_ACCESS with no clue where. So then I need a debugger…

% make && lldb -o run -- tbasic -d test1.bas

[update: Forgot the -- before the program, which prevents lldb from reading those params. Command lines without parens are easy to get wrong!]

I don't really do much serious with lldb, I just need to see where an error occurred, backtrace (bt), and sometimes print some variables, to usually be able to solve a crash. It's a little frustrating that the lldb environment is so primitive, though, doesn't even have stdout, stderr (weirdly \<stdio.h> is callable), so how do I call utility functions? Had to rewrite some functions to take default NULL values.

Anyway, let and print (and error, my idiosyncratic stderr print) work, there's not a lot left in BASIC then I can get back to more serious things.

On tbasic, I've been doing all my C coding in BBEdit, not fucking Xcode, and it is fantastic. Doesn't crash. Syntax highlighting works, and by "works" I mean doesn't replace my text with Cyrillic as Xcode is wont to do (I do not like the new BBEdit color theme editor, but it's a far cry from stabbing me in the face like Xcode does). BBedit's window stays where I fucking put it, and sidebar shows clearly which files are open and modified. Running make from iTerm2 works fine, if you aren't an idiot and each compile produces less than a handful of errors. I can't really use BBEdit for JavaScript which needs more tool support, but for simpler languages, it's fine.

OS X Mojave no longer has C man pages visible anywhere I can find, so Dash is the only way to look anything up:

• Dash app

To use it from the shell, create dashman: (hashtag command-line integration, I couldn't find this in any search, and Dash has no AppleScript which is my usual solution to o'erweening GUIs)

#!/bin/zsh
open "dash://$*"

Hm. So, I've worked with people who don't learn their languages, they just rely on autocomplete in an IDE, snippets, and StackOverflow. If this is you, if you can't code without an Internet connection, you can't code. Please stop programming, go away, and read a book until you know the syntax and fundamental APIs, because right now you do more harm than good.

That said, while I studied K&R (and Stephen Kochan's Programming in C, my introduction back in the '80s) with the intensity of a snake-handler reading his Bible, I certainly can't remember every strcspn, strcoll, strstrn or whatever random series of 7-letter identifiers they had to use back in the '70s (even in the late '80s, I was still using C compilers which only distinguished 7-letter identifiers). C's libraries are often gibberish and searchable man pages are all we have.