So I'm coding in C n stuff1 - Page 2

BottleAbuser

Korea (South)1888 Posts

January 08 2009 11:43 GMT

#21

I got my own questions.

Why does main method traditionally return an int? What the bloody hell is it good for?

Aren't there algorithms that make use of recursion, which would be a big pain to turn into iterative implementations using stacks? I suppose the asymptotal speed and space would be the same, if that's what Bockit's professor was saying.

Oh, and fonger, most compilers these days automatically optimize tail and head recursion so that they don't uselessly fill up your stack.

HeadBangaa

United States6512 Posts

January 08 2009 12:34 GMT

#22

On January 08 2009 19:56 Bockit wrote:
My professor would say that recursion tends to be the more 'elegant' solution, but is never better than iteration.

Tail recursion is just fine.

Scorch

Austria3371 Posts

January 08 2009 12:48 GMT

#23

On January 08 2009 20:43 BottleAbuser wrote:
Why does main method traditionally return an int? What the bloody hell is it good for?

I'm not much of a C programmer, but I think it's being used for error handling. If everything works, you normally return 0. If not, you can return an error code to see what went wrong.

MasterOfChaos

Germany2896 Posts

January 08 2009 12:50 GMT

#24

Why does main method traditionally return an int?
-Because programs return an int(I'm not sure about the range. But I think 16bit)
This is usually only relevant for console programs, and mostly used to signal an error back to the calling program/script.

In general you will use mostly iteration in c, but recursion where necessary.

Darth_Ihsahn

Mexico138 Posts

January 08 2009 17:42 GMT

#25

On January 08 2009 16:00 GHOSTCLAW wrote:

Show nested quote +

C is really really good to learn depending on what you actually want to do. Embedded systems all use C, just because they tend to be speed dependent, and you're memory/processor constrained. C runs pretty fast (not like hand optimized coding "to the metal", but close enough ><;

I work writing code for microcontrollers and this is absolutely right. C has a good balance between speed/resources and portability.

To expand a bit on what MasterOfChaos said, you usually need a return value for your program (main method) when you execute it as a part of a batch process and you need to know whether it succeeded or not.

This is how IDEs work under the hood. They call the compiler for each source file in the project, if all succeeded, they call the linker, if there is no error, a "build successful" message is displayed.

Mastermind

Canada7096 Posts

January 08 2009 19:53 GMT

#26

On January 08 2009 21:34 HeadBangaa wrote:

Show nested quote +

Tail recursion is just fine.

yes, as long as the language you are programming is uses tail call optimization. Not all of them do.

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