C for an Object-Oriented programmer-Collection of common programming errors

Don’t think you have to shelve your knowledge of object-oriented work – you can “program into the language”.

I had to work in C after being primarily experienced in object-oriented work. C allows for some level of object concepts to pull through. At the job, I had to implement a red-black tree in C, for use in a sweep-line algorithm to find the intersection points in a set of segments. Since the algorithm used different comparison functions, I ended up using function pointers to achieve the same effect as lambdas in Scheme or delegates in C#. It worked well, and also allowed the balanced tree to be reusable.

The other feature of the balanced tree was using void pointers to store arbitrary data. Again, void and function pointers in C are a pain (if you don’t know their ins and outs), but they can be used to approximate creating a generic data structure.

One final note: use the right tool for the job. If you want to use C simply to master procedural technique, then choose a problem that is well-suited to a procedural approach. I didn’t have a choice in the matter (legacy application written in C, and people demand the world and refuse to enter the 21st century), so I had to be creative. C is great for low/medium abstractions from the machine, say if you wanted to write a command-line packet inspection program.