I have an interest in learning a programming language in order to write programs to manipulate a fairly large set of numbers. For instance, I would like to write a programs to sort and maniuplate in various ways different baseball statistics on all of the active players in the last 40 years.

Is C the right language for me?

Back 25 years ago, I learned BASIC and APL and think that, with the help of my teen-age kids, I could learn a computer language -- but I don't want to make the effort only to find out that the computer programming language was inappropriate for what I was trying to do.

If C is not the right language -- what is? All guidance is appreciated.

Doug

Hi Doug. Welcome to GIDForums. Being the moderator of the C programming forums here, all I can think of to say is YES! But, I want to be careful in saying that. C is very apt at doing the kinds of things that you want to do, but so are several other languages as well as databases and even spreadsheets. One thing with C is that it is really a very basic language at the root of it. It doesn't *restrict* you as some other languages might, so it is really easy to write bad programs . At its basis, it is really simple to see that it is working with data at the memory level. So instead of thinking of a string, it is thinking of a collection of contiguous ASCII bytes that is terminated by a NULL charecter.

Depending on your background and your desire to learn some of the lower level aspects, I think C would be a good language to learn. I am amazed at how many of the newer languages are still based on the basic structure of C.

I would start out with the basic C language/structure and then move onto C++ if that is something that interests you. Even though C++ adds some nice features, I still find myself reverting to C over the long run.

If you get a chance, drop by the C forums here. We have a small code repository and there is also some pretty good discussions and code snippets. Try to evaluate whether C makes sense in your mind. If you do give it a go, post us a message. There are plenty of people there to give you a hand.

Good Luck.

if you have studied C, you can quickly come into C++,and then to JAVA
that is : C->C++->JAVA
or there is another way:
PASCAL->DELFHI

Hey, by the sound of your needs in a programming language, I recommend Python. It is by far one of the easiest to read and learn. It's almost like the English language in that the statements are direct and intelligible. Python.org is the hub of all the tutorials and support for the language. Plus the interpreter (not compiled) is free!