21st Century C, 2nd Edition

Chapter 7. Inessential C Syntax that Textbooks Spend a Lot of Time Covering

I believe it is good

Let’s destroy it.

Porno for Pyros, “Porno for Pyros”

C may be a relatively simple language, but the C standard is about 700 pages, so unless you want to devote your life to studying it, it is important to know which parts can be ignored.

We can start with digraphs and trigraphs. If your keyboard is missing the { and } keys, you can use <% and %> as a replacement (like int main() <% … %>). This was relevant in the 1990s, when keyboards around the world followed diverse customs, but today it is hard to find a keyboard anywhere that is missing curly braces. The trigraph equivalents from C99 and C11 §5.2.1.1(1), ??< and ??>, are so useless that the authors of gcc and clang didn’t bother to implement code to parse them.

Obscure corners of the language like trigraphs are easy to ignore, because nobody mentions them. But other parts of the language got heavy mention in textbooks from decades past, to address requirements in C89 or deal with limitations of computing hardware of the 1900s. With fewer restrictions, we can streamline our code. If you get joy from deleting code and eliminating redundancies, this chapter is for you.

Don’t Bother Explicitly Returning from main

As a warm-up, let’s shave a line off every program you write.

Your program must have a main function, and it has to be of return type int, so you must absolutely have the following in your program:

int main(){ ... }