On: 32 years on, K&R's "The C Programming Language" st...

[_delirium]

It doesn't hurt that the total number of constructs in K&R C is really quite small. I'm not sure there are any current languages with comparably few constructs; maybe Arc. Even Scheme is bigger, at least for a recent version (say, R6RS).

[hga → _delirium]

True, but the revolt against R6RS has been ... fierce. None of the new steering committee members was in favor of it and we expect a move back towards the old virtues.

Still, Scheme does try to address a lot of higher level things, e.g. the full numeric tower, whereas C shines as a universal very close to the metal assembler.

[protomyth → _delirium]

Even with that, look at the books on C programming in stores (there still are a few). All of them are at least double the size of the K&R book.

Of all the C++ books, there was a C++ in 10 minutes from SAMS that was small, dense packed, and informative. It was really weird coming from them.