Silly newbie question - Caret character (^)

[Philip Semanchuk]

On Nov 9, 2010, at 1:04 AM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> In message <slrnidhcns.9m6.usenet-nospam at guild.seebs.net>, Seebs wrote:
> 
>> On 2010-11-09, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo at geek-central.gen.new_zealand>
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> In message <mailman.697.1289067607.2218.python-list at python.org>, Dennis
>>> Lee Bieber wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Have you ever looked at the reference manual for Ada?
>> 
>>> Or even worse, the annotated reference. I thought annotations were
>>> supposed to clarify things; in this case they seemed to have the opposite
>>> effect...
>> 
>> Clearly, you've never seen Schildt's infamous "Annotated ANSI C Standard".
> 
> There absolutely no chance (or at least no way I can imagine) that anyone 
> could annotate a concise language like C up to the level of turgidity of the 
> Ada spec.
> 
> Hang on, is this Herb Schildt? I bought a couple of his books, back when I 
> was trying to get to grips with C++ (I have the edition of “C++ The Complete 
> Reference” which proudly proclaims it “Covers the New International Standard 
> for C+”). Not as useful as I thought they would be; I ended up referring to 
> the libstdc++ sources to clarify things.

What's funny is that I went looking for a printed copy of the C standard a few years back and the advice I got was that the cheapest route was to find a used copy of Schildt's "Annotated ANSI C Standard" and ignore the annotations. So it serves at least one useful purpose.

Cheers
Philip