Better to learn C before learning C++ than not.

(Believe me, I would know - nearly failed CS170 this semester. Somehow I pulled out a C-...)

-- Griffinhart

k. thx. hey, is there a difference in the c core structure from c++? becuz i was wondering if a c++ compiler wud work to compile c. and i'm running a windows system with linux on a partition. i'm still getting used to linux.

Anything you can do in C, a C++ compiler should be able to handle, if it's a proper C++ compiler. C++ is backwards-compatible with C.

-- Griffinhart

Wrong.

EDIT: I should probably give an example.

void* foo = …;
int* bar = foo;

is perfectly valid in C, and it's certainly not in C++.

No, I meant that if you write C code, the C++ compiler should be able to recognize and handle it as such - not that you can code in C++ the same way as you can in C.

Unless I have been lied to for these past two semesters.

-- Griffinhart

For the most part, C code can be compiled with a C++ compiler, but there are some differences like the one prophile brings up. It would be very odd to have a C++ compiler _without_ a C compiler packaged with it, though.

thanks. anyone know how to set up the borland 5.5.1 c++ compiler? i dont know how to write a config file

Don't use the Borland compiler. It's broken in many ways. If you are serious about development in Windows, install either Microsoft Visual C++ Express or MinGW. Or, if you're more brave, you could install Linux and use GCC in that.

The only upside to Borland's IDE is CodeGuard, as one of my professors showed us.

(Personally I prefer GCC, but I think I've established that already.)

-- Griffinhart

From what I saw when I googled it, it's basically Valgrind, right?

Sure...? I dunno what Valgrind is.

(My professor was talking about other programs similar to CodeGuard, but the ones he mentioned weren't free.)

-- Griffinhart

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valgrind

It's a debugging tool, helps you find memory leaks and such.

Yep, sounds like CodeGuard, then.

-- Griffinhart

how do u guys feel about dev cpp? i got that out of recommendation of my friends college professor (computer engineering). i still dont know how to program becuz i cant get ahold of the tools u guys keep recommending. i still dont have a system at home, otherwise i wud have installed fedora already. btw, can u install os's off a dvdr containing them? becuz fedora is a 2 gig disk image. it wont fit on a cd.

The Dev-C++ IDE is quite dated now. It's not maintained (last update was February 2005), and the GCC version distributed with it is quite old and fairly worthless. The tools I recommended are all free to download and use, so I think instead of scrambling for a half-assed IDE that you can throw on a flash drive, you instead should focus on getting a working computer system. You can configure some very nicely spec'd machines here, and typically find a very very powerful machine for under $1600 (even more powerful than a big name company would provide).

If you intend to install Linux on the machine though, I'd recommend getting a machine with an ATI graphics card. nVIDIA provides nice proprietary drivers with good 3D support, but they are proprietary. No source code provided. The open source nVIDIA driver being developed, known as Nouveau only currently provides buggy 2D graphics acceleration and only software 3D support. In other words, terrible. On the other hand, the open source ATI drivers actually exceed the performance of the proprietary ATI drivers now, and they are getting better with every release. And such drivers mean that you also get nifty features like kernel modesetting.