Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!hp-sdd!ucsdhub!loral!jlh From: jlh@loral.UUCP (Physically Phffft) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: thanks for "down" answers Summary: Teachers in Ivory Towers Keywords: aack thppt Message-ID: <1886@loral.UUCP> Date: 13 Dec 88 21:33:17 GMT References: <9142@smoke.BRL.MIL> <685@auspex.UUCP> Reply-To: jlh@loral.UUCP (Physically Phffft) Organization: At the Remote Controls Lines: 21 In article <685@auspex.UUCP> guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) writes: >>I have entirely missed that point. This is how I was shown and taught. > >Oh dear. Sounds like the person who taught you needs a little remedial >education; could you please point out to them that assigning the result >of "getchar()" to a "char" variable is incorrect? It gets worse. 2-3 weeks ago one of my instructors decided to explain fork, exec, and waits. In all his examples he used wait ( (char *) 0). I pointed out to him that wait wanted an address in which to stuff a result, and using 0 was probably not a good idea. His reply was 'thats how it is in my manual', after a few minutes of discussion it got upgraded to 'I tried it on my system and it works'. So, Chris, Doug, and Henry, prepare yourself for 30 or so bright and eager new programmers who will think 'wait ((char *) 0)' is the preferred way to do things. Coming your way this June! Jim -- Jim Harkins jlh@loral.cts.com Loral Instrumentation, San Diego