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From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: *\"LDA\" ok?
Message-ID: <6332@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 24-Aug-87 14:24:37 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.6332
Posted: Mon Aug 24 14:24:37 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 25-Aug-87 03:58:15 EDT
References: <8877@brl-adm.ARPA> <8088@mimsy.UUCP> <1623@tekchips.TEK.COM>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 18

In article <1623@tekchips.TEK.COM> barts@tekchips.UUCP (Bart Schaefer) writes:
>I suppose, however, that it could be argued that this will only delay
>understanding strcmp(), but at least the novice will have a "function"
>that does what built-in equivalency tests in other languages already do.

Perhaps it would help if they were told that strcmp() does NOT test for
string equality; rather, it compare the lexical ordering of two strings.
This makes it useful sometimes for the function used with qsort().  The
test for exact match is simply a common special case.

People often have the same problem understanding the function of the
UNIX "cat" utility; they think of it as "printing a file", but that is
just a special case of its general use as a file concatenator.  This
attempt to achive maximal generality is characteristic of UNIX, at least
as it was originally developed, and is one of the first things that a
person learning to program in C or on UNIX should learn.  Kernighan &
Plauger's "Software Tools" is a good introduction; Kernighan & Pike's
"The UNIX Programming Environment" also teaches this point.