C Coding

Hi Folks,

I'm pretty new to this board and I'm curious how long ye all have been programming in C for? Personally I did C programming back in College over 11 years ago in 1996 but I have not really touched it since 1998. A bit of shock of how time flies. Since then I have been using Oracle's SQLPLUS with Forms and Reports.
I decided to revisit the C scene and I'm going back over the old notes. I'm amazed how I forgot so and how exact you needed to be when handling C. I'm going back over it for fun and to get to grips with it again.

Questions I like to ask you guys is what do you use C for these days outside of work? Do you find it rewarding to create something out of nothing and progress it to something impressive?

Back then I remember small little games like coreWars and playing with drawing the MandelBrot set? Another easy to master gem was making mazes and recursively finding your way out. I'd like to start doing that again. Back then, there wasn't much of an online community (outside of usenet) and it's endearing and refreshing to find a site like this.

I use it all the time - at work and for the little "home" projects as well, especially for the embedded programming which I do from time to time on my AVR

I also find it relaxing in some way to just take a small problem and just "do it" and see it all working without all the baggage of requirements, design and testing which are necessary for large work type projects.

I took a C course in college before moving on to C++ which I am now currently studying in University. If I code in my own time i create game apps and somtimes device large projects. I have been activley coding since I was 12, when I took an interest in the BASIC language for the old Acorn systems in school. You could press F12 and type in BASIC and you could create very simple programs. Sort of like this one

Code:

10 PRINT "HELLO THIS IS BASIC"
20 "ENTER A NUMBER "
30 INPUT A$
40 PRINT "YOU ENTERED A$"
50 ENDPROC
60 END

Ahh. memories...

Nice to see how MS have evolved that into the visual Basic we see today.

I had the usual C course at university but from earlier experience, already knew pretty much everything. I read several C books to learn the language without actually using it much, never found a way to use it practically and back then, I found it too low level.

I took up C again over 1 month ago and worked my way back into it. Since I have lots of experience with other languages and some very similar like Perl or PHP, it didn't take very long to learn the syntax and get a feeling for the language.

At the moment I am preparing several courses on algorithms that I will give in 1 week and will use C as my language of choice for code samples and implementations. The courses will be for the Luxembourg delegation for the International Olympiad in Informatics which is in Croatia this year.