C Frequent Answers

According to Google Groups, I've posted almost 12,000 articles in comp.lang.c and comp.lang.c.moderated from 1996 to 2004. Whereas caution is needed in reading my older articles, due to the amount of flamage often granted off-topic questions, some of the latest ones actually give good advice. The last few years, in fact, I've tried to work up a high-quality set of “stock” answers to supplement Steve Summit's C FAQ, which receives updates only rarely. This webpage collects those stock answers, revised only slightly for the web, as listed below:

• When are casts appropriate?

• Why should toupper()'s argument be cast to unsigned char?

• How should main() be declared?

• How should malloc()'s return value be used?

• How should sizeof be used in malloc()'s argument?

• How should I pick the value to pass to srand()?

• What alternatives are there to the C library's rand() and srand()?

• What are the advantages of iteration over recursion, and vice versa?

• How can I shuffle the contents of an array?

• Why should strncpy() generally be avoided?

• Why should strtok() generally be avoided?

• Why is there no “logical exclusive or” operator?

• comp.lang.c topicality guidance.

• Example identifier prefix convention.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Allin Cottrell, Hallvard B Furuseth, Richard Heathfield, Jeremy Yallop, Serve Lau, Peter Nilsson, Eric Sosman, Keith Thompson, “Old Wolf,” and Ian Woods (in alphabetical order) for their comments. My apologies to anyone I missed.