Z Space Blog

I've been asked a few times over the years why I chose to learn C with the colloquially-known "K&R C Bible", and specifically the Category-0 style, coined on USENET back in the day.

For those unfamiliar, I'm talking about The C Programming Language, 2nd Ed., by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the creators of the language. In it are a series of exercises that the reader can work on to build their knowledge of C through actually building something with it. On comp.lang.c, people would share their solutions to exercises in this book. After a while, they coined different categories of solutions, to refer to their robustness and complexity.

Category-0 is solving each exercise using only the knowledge the book gives you, up to that point. In other words, it's to approach it as a complete newbie and see what you can put together using only the stuff you've learned in the book.

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Vim has good support for showing the differences between two (or three) files with either the vimdiff command or setting up a diff session manually. This often requires opening the files in their own window panes, then using :diffthis in all the relevant files. If you're in the middle of an editing session, stopping to set up this diff session can cause you to lose focus. I wrote a function in my vimrc that automates this process, so the user can focus on making decisions instead of building their UI or some other flow-breaking process.

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