Re: [tlug] Step Aside Kernighan and Ritchie: Bjarne Rules! . . . . . . . .

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim  <jep200404@example.com> writes:

    Jim> I knew that Stroustrup had much to do with C++, but I did not
    Jim> know that he had much to do with defining C.

I'm pretty sure he has a few credits in the ANSI C standards, not to
mention that C++ has had great effect on C (including local
abominations like the "//" commenting convention and mid-block
declarations -- fine for C++ but should not have been grafted on to C
in a world where people are still using gcc 2.95).

    >> Yeah... if they're going to the trouble of emitting an
    >> apparently ASCII header, would that not suggest that the whole
    >> message is in ASCII?

    Jim> Nope. I've seen plenty of mixed data in my life, and expect
    Jim> to see more mixed data.

Note that in the Mac system calls, use of 4-octet char literals (which
are actually ints internally) is something of an art.  For example,
the constants 'emcs' and 'xmcs' are used to identify GNU Emacs and
XEmacs resources, respectively.

Also, many of the magic numbers that file(1) recognizes are carefully
chosen to be readable when interpreted as a bigendian ASCII string.

The idea is that if you do an ASCII + hex dump, the "#0" will stick
out like a sore thumb in a field of random characters, half of which
are periods ("unrepresentable by an printing ASCII character").


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