this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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You can pry pattern matching from my cold dead hands (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 3 weeks ago by flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

With Rust you safe 1 char, and gain needing to skip a whole line to see what type something is.

Honestly, the Rust way of doing things feels much more natural to me.

You can read it as

  1. Define a function,
  2. with the name getoffmylawn,
  3. that takes a Lawn argument named lawn,
  4. and returns a bool

Whereas the C function is read as

  1. Do something with a bool? Could be a variable, could be a function, could be a forward declaration of a function,
  2. whatever it is, it has the name getoffmylawn,
  3. there's a (, so all options are still on the table,
  4. ok, that' a function, since it takes a Lawn argument named lawn, that returns a bool
[–] cryoistalline@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

types in C are pretty weird

int *a can be read as

  1. *a is a int
  2. since dereferencing is a operator on pointers, a is a pointer to int

int *a, b is read as

  1. *a and b are int
  2. so a is a pointer to int and b is a int

bool getofmylawn(Lawn lawn)

  1. getoffmylawn(Lawn lawn) is a bool
  2. since calling is done on functions, getoffmylawn is a function that takes a Lawn and returns a bool

And then you have function pointers

bool (*foo(int a))(float b)

  1. (*foo(int a))(float b) is a bool
  2. *foo(int a) is a function from float to bool
  3. foo(int a) is a function pointer from float to bool
  4. foo is a function that takes a int and returns a function pointer from float to bool

really weird in my opinion.

[–] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 4 points 3 weeks ago

C++ is even worse, due to templates and the so-called most vexing parse. Initializing with {} mitigated the latter somewhat, but came with its own set of woes