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Hey everyone,
I've been diving into C# .NET recently and I couldn't help but notice some similarities with C programming. I'm curious about how much C programming principles influence C# .NET and how understanding C might help in mastering C#.
Key Points of Discussion:
Syntax and Basic Constructs:
C# shares many basic syntax elements with C, such as data types (int, char, float), control structures (if, for, while), and operators (+, -, *, /). How much does familiarity with these elements in C help when learning C#?
Memory Management:
C provides manual memory management using malloc and free, whereas C# handles memory through garbage collection. How does this difference impact the way we write and optimize code in C# compared to C?
Pointers and References:
While C heavily relies on pointers, C# abstracts memory management but still allows the use of pointers in an unsafe context. How relevant are C pointers when dealing with C# programming, especially in performance-critical applications?
Object-Oriented Programming:
C# is inherently object-oriented, unlike C. For those coming from a C background, how challenging is it to grasp the object-oriented concepts in C#? How can C principles aid in understanding these concepts?
Platform Independence:
C# through .NET Core aims to be platform-independent, much like C programs can be compiled on various platforms. What are the key differences in achieving platform independence between the two languages?
Use Cases and Applications:
C is often used for system-level programming and embedded systems, while C# is popular for web applications, desktop applications, and game development using Unity. How do these different use cases affect the choice of language and the transition from C to C#?
Your Experiences and Insights:
I’d love to hear from those of you who have experience in both C and C#. How did your knowledge of C help (or not help) you when learning C#? Are there specific areas where you felt a strong correlation or significant differences? Any tips for someone coming from a C background and looking to excel in C# .NET?
Looking forward to an engaging discussion!
Cheers,
Tejaswini
modified yesterday.
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...this feels like a test. Are you trying to get us to do your homework?
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C# is merely VB.NET with some steroids added...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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Perhaps surprisingly, C# and C share very little, other than some superficial similarities in syntax - and it's not until you understand both languages pretty well that you can appreciate (or even notice!) many of them!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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C# is part of the C like programming language family. (like C++, rust, ...)
They all share some syntactic similarities, but they quickly diverge into their own specific language.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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My opinion is that if you learn any programming language at all then you have learned 50% of all of them, arbitrary percentages notwithstanding. It's more "true" if we subdivide into things like functional vs OOP languages.
A loop is a loop, the core of just about every data structure tend be an array, a hashmap is a hashmap, race conditions, resource contention, thread safety, cyclomatic complexity, atomicity... All these concepts and a great many more are going to exist no matter what language you are working in.
This is part of the argument I think I have read before which posits that multilingual people tend to pick up programming a bit easier and already have the neurons knocking around upstairs in much an order suitable. This makes sense because programming is just the language we use to command machines.
There are/can be vast differences and the nuances do often matter. But the concepts - those bits that help you understand what matters and what does not? These are very universal.
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I agree.
Having been through a Fortran, Cobol, PL/I, C cycle, the baby steps for each were fewer and fewer as one transitioned.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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Well except for pure Lisp maybe. That one always seemed way different to me.
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Once you've learned one of the "curly brace languages", you've learned nearly all of them because you've learned the concepts behind them. All the same concepts apply to all languages. After you learn the concepts, it's just a matter of semantics in describing what you want the code to do.
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Seems like you asked ChatGPT to create questions for you to ask here nice try. NEXT !!!
Caveat Emptor.
"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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I don't think of them as much the same. They're both C family so the syntax is similar, but that's about where the similarities end.
The datatypes for example, appear the same but they are not. A C int is not equivalent to a C# concept of an int as C's word size is not fixed, but varies by machine. Floats and doubles are the same but that probably has as much to do with IEEE as anything.
Using pointers in C# raises the question of why not use C? More importantly, the unsafe context only works on code that is fully trusted, greatly limiting where and how it can be deployed. There's almost nothing you can do with unsafe that you can't do with the marshalling infrastructure. Finally, using pointers often harms GC performance because you have to pin memory addresses so they don't get relocated during a collection.
I don't know how hard it is to grasp OOP. I picked it up in the 1980s. It has been too long, but I don't remember it being especially difficult - particularly once you understand how C++ implements classes and that you can make virtually the same constructs in C, just more verbose.
C is cross compatible source code. C# is cross compatible binary code. C# requires a VM. C does not. C runs in far more places - places where C# will never run.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Agree, except: C# requires a VM ... unless I misunderstood your statement
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C# requires a VM. C does not.
I wrote that. I can defend it. The CLI is a virtual machine. Its instruction set is IL. Its runtimes are the CLR.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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But it will compile finally to the target machine native processor code
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It's JIT compiled, which is an implementation detail of the VM, similar to javascript on a modern browser.
Furthermore, setting aside that, it still cannot manage memory without the CLI, even compiled to native code. It requires the virtual machine in order to do basic operations. That machine is not simply part of the run time library like C's heap stuff. It's garbage collected - a process.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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honey the codewitch wrote: it still cannot manage memory without the CLI
This, along with some other 'limitations', is a limitation of the runtime, not the language.
And in relation to compiling, there is nothing in the language that prevents it being compiled.
=
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Well said. Good words.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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As OriginalGriff said the similarities between C and C# are pretty superficial. It's really just syntactical: braces for for blocks, semicolon statement separators, simple data types (int, char, float, etc.) and simple control statements (if, for, while, etc.), other things I can't think of right now.
C, C#, C++, Java, Go, Rust, Kotlin, others? All share much of this same basic syntax. It makes it somewhat simpler to learn or move between them.
My understanding is C# was Microsoft's answer to Java after losing it's court case against Oracle over the future of Java in the late 1990's.
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As an old member here answered once...
Do not forget that my compiler compiled your compiler.
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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A proper C compiler is implemented in C and compiles itself. 
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Doesn't that hold for the great majority of languges/compilers since around 1970?
Usually you need to create a small bootstrap in some other language. I was told (so I have no URL to back it up) that Nick Wirth attempted to write a compiler for the very first, super simple core Pascal (1970) in Fortran, but gave up and reverted to assembler - I don't know for which machine. Once this was running, all following extensions to full Pascal was written in the simpler Pascal dialect, as is the common strategy for all language/compiler bootstrapping.
I guess that languages deviating a lot from the algorithmic style (such as APL, Prolog, SNOBOL, Lisp, ...) have compilers / interpreters written in other languages, at least for production work. (I would be sort of surprised if no APL programmer has written an APL interpreter in APL!) But for the algorithmic languages group, the great majority have compilers expressed in themselves. This, of course, does not prohibit compilers written in other languages - I guess one main reason for that is that the compiler developer knows C only.
I know of one case where no bootstrapping in another language was required: The compiler was written in itself. Its developer put the compiler source up on the document holder by his keyboard, and compiled each statement in his head, typing in the machine instructions he knew that the compiler would generate. Of course he knew - he had written the compiler! This was in 1974.
Admittedly, this was a rather simple language - abstraction level was lower than K&R C. Yet it illustrates the principle of writing a compiler in its own language.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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To the best of my knowledge, the Multics PL/1 compiler was pretty much entirely written in PL/1. Of course, so was the great majority of the Multics operating system, from which sprung that which was called UNIX (formerly UNICS, a play on the Multics name).
In other, older, systems, compilers were quite often written entirely in the assembler of the host/target machine. I remember poring through the source of a COBOL-68 compiler trying to find a solution to what I thought was a rather stupid bug in the parser. The entire compiler was written in assembler, and printed out the source was over a foot thick.
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trønderen wrote: I know of one case where no bootstrapping in another language was required:
The Forth Language, at least as originally created, was written like that. It requires a stack and very little beyond that.
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You can end any initializer list and enumeration with a comma, just as in C.
... = { 1, 2, 3, };
Dennis M. Ritchie (may God rest his soul in peace) wrote that he was always forgetting to include a comma at the end of a row, when editing/extending such a list, and therefore changed the underlying grammar so that the C compiler accepts a last comma.
40 years later and many derived languages, nobody dared to change this.
It would be interesting to check if this syntax still applies to "modern" languages like JavaScript, Rust etc.
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I learned C# many years ago coming from a Delphi background.
I found C# not that different from Delphi if you substitute begin and end with { and }
After all they were both developed by the same person. (Anders Hejlsberg - Wikipedia[^])
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