Originally Posted by
MK27
Which takes us back to:
And I completely agree. Because I now understand what a pointer is, the Koenig and Moo statement makes sense (pointlessly). If I did not know, I doubt very much that it were serve to clarify the matter. At all.
One day in the distant future maybe I will write a book for beginner's on C. I can totally remember going through material and thinking I'd like to, because much of the material is so bad. I honestly believe the standard of technical writing on CS and programming is a often a low one. This may be similar to other academic fields which suffer from a lack of original sources for material and must depend on a slightly inbred circus of "my teacher wrote the textbook I am required to pay for".
In turn, the style of this low standard is taken up by people who prepare tutorials, etc, and gradually disseminates itself into acceptability. Once you know the language, it obviously easy to defend a piece of work by saying, "Well, the code is not wrong" or even "the code is good" and opinions on the kind of discourse you site above will be "subjective". What they are saying may be true, but it is almost semantic obfuscation masquerading as an "explanation".