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Watercooler

C is weird

It’s logical when you realize <code>a[b]</code> is the same as <code>*(a + b)</code>. 
But if I ever see such code in a codebase I will fucking lose it.

My only prediction why this made it into the standard is because back then, someone made a bug in a C-translator, which bug caused existence of such abscene code <code>3[array]</code>. So maybe the colleagues believed “if we fix it, it will crash a numerous amount of systems, so let’s just leave it there and explain it with the comutative property of the operator +, which is used to reference the address in the expression above.
I still love it and explain it to the students each time, it’s a fun fact.
In JavaScript, for example, there’re so, so many weird things like this, so it’s not such a big news there :)

honestly, this isn’t weird at all lol
it’s just taking the address <code>array</code> and adding 3 to it, which ever way you look at it.
Yes it is not intuitive at all, but it’s just the way memory works under the hood (a starting address plus an offset), and i’m surprised by how the number of programmers that don’t know the basics of how memory works 😶😶

Today we have standards and watchdogs that make sure modern compilers meet them. Back then, we had…this.

3[array]
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--hmbOcVE6--/f_auto/v1747505013/ugc/content_1b24c91e-9f1d-4566-90da-a41834e83e65?_a=BAMClqUq0" alt="drake_no">
array[3]
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--r_HhQC-q--/f_auto/v1747505059/ugc/content_1b284819-13d2-41bb-8e75-91e032294551?_a=BAMClqUq0" alt="drakeyes">