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0 pointstptacek16y ago0 comments

I didn't see a lot of questions here that needed "looking up".

Most embedded C devs know what "volatile" does, because if you get that wrong your program crashes.

Very few developers know how to craft hygenic cpp macros, but since the question didn't ask about hygiene, I wouldn't expect anyone to feel like they should "look it up". You kind of either know it or you don't.

If anything, the problem with this quiz is that it was far too superficial.

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2 comments · 1 top-level

gte910h16y ago· 1 in thread

1. C Compiler Compliance question

2. Behavior of UL on a non-32 bit system according to modern standards and the compliance of compilers to that standard

and

3. That the declaration of a pointer to a constant int array was actually that. This is a prime case for using C-Decl or whatever the name of the program is that is mentioned in K&R, (or at least some googling).

All three of these should be looked up. If you have experience with a particular system that uses the last item a lot, then you possibly should not be looking that up. The other two items most assuredly should be looked up. Very very few people have the experience of writing code that works on all sorts of systems using processors of differing word size while compiling on modern compilers. Only those few souls shouldn't be looking up the answers to #1 and #2

tptacekOP16y ago

The compiler compliance question would be good to look up if it was easy to look up. It is in fact just a bad question (I got it wrong, saying "most" where they expected "all").

Embedded developers don't usually need to look up word size issues; it's hard to do your day to day job if you don't know what an "int" is. Nevertheless, that issue actually has very little to do with the question, which you answer simply by choosing the constant that is most specific about its storage requirements.

If you don't know how const works, you probably don't use const much; keeping code const-correct (a waste of time, for what it's worth) drills this stuff into you pretty quickly. Again, it's not a great embedded dev question, but it assessess what it means to assess: whether you know how const works.

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