The New Hacker's Dictionary

C // n.

1. The third letter of the English alphabet.

2. ASCII 1000011.

3. The name of a programming language designed by Dennis Ritchie during the early 1970s and immediately used to reimplement Unix; so called because many features derived from an earlier compiler named 'B' in commemoration of its parent, BCPL. (BCPL was in turn descended from an earlier Algol-derived language, CPL.) Before Bjarne Stroustrup settled the question by designing C++, there was a humorous debate over whether C's successor should be named 'D' or 'P'. C became immensely popular outside Bell Labs after about 1980 and is now the dominant language in systems and microcomputer applications programming. See also languages of choice, indent style.

C is often described, with a mixture of fondness and disdain varying according to the speaker, as "a language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language".

C Programmer's Disease // n.

The tendency of the undisciplined C programmer to set arbitrary but supposedly generous static limits on table sizes (defined, if you're lucky, by constants in header files) rather than taking the trouble to do proper dynamic storage allocation. If an application user later needs to put 68 elements into a table of size 50, the afflicted programmer reasons that he or she can easily reset the table size to 68 (or even as much as 70, to allow for future expansion) and recompile. This gives the programmer the comfortable feeling of having made the effort to satisfy the user's (unreasonable) demands, and often affords the user multiple opportunities to explore the marvelous consequences of fandango on core. In severe cases of the disease, the programmer cannot comprehend why each fix of this kind seems only to further disgruntle the user.

C&C //

[common, esp. on news.admin.net-abuse.email] Contraction of "Coffee & Cats". This frequently occurs as a warning label on USENET posts that are likely to cause you to snarf coffee onto your keyboard and startle the cat off your lap.

C++ /C'-pluhs-pluhs/ n.

Designed by Bjarne Stroustrup of AT&T Bell Labs as a successor to C. Now one of the languages of choice, although many hackers still grumble that it is the successor to either Algol 68 or Ada (depending on generation), and a prime example of second-system effect. Almost anything that can be done in any language can be done in C++, but it requires a language lawyer to know what is and what is not legal-- the design is almost too large to hold in even hackers' heads. Much of the cruft results from C++'s attempt to be backward compatible with C. Stroustrup himself has said in his retrospective book "The Design and Evolution of C++" (p. 207), "Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out." [Many hackers would now add "Yes, and it's called Java" --ESR]