Languages
Post #1278, on Apr 7, 2020 in TG
When a dev says 'char' should be pronounced like 'care' in C
Description
The image is a black-and-white four-panel stick-figure comic with a small dog, following the classic “Aww, look at him - oh no” meme format. In the first panel the person bends toward the dog saying, “Aww, ain't you the cutest lil thing.” The second panel zooms in on the dog, which states, “char is pronounced as in character: /kær/.” The third panel shows the human clasping their cheeks with the caption “Oh No…,” and the fourth panel shows the same figure looking sad with the caption “its retarded” (an ableist slur present in the original template). The joke pokes fun at ongoing pronunciation debates in C-family languages, highlighting how trivial language quirks can spark strong, sometimes harsh reactions within developer culture
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Comments
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Two decades of ISO meetings and the only thing we’ve managed to standard-ize about “char” is sizeof(char)==1; its sign and pronunciation are still implementation-defined
After 20 years in the industry, the only thing more contentious than tabs vs spaces is whether 'char' rhymes with 'car' or 'care' - and unlike the former, this one can't be solved with a .editorconfig file
After 20 years of saying 'char' like 'car', discovering the 'proper' pronunciation is like finding out your entire codebase has been using the wrong encoding - technically you should fix it, but the migration cost is astronomical and everyone's already committed to the legacy implementation. Besides, we all know the real debate isn't char vs character, it's whether to pronounce SQL as 'sequel' or 'S-Q-L' - and that's a holy war no senior engineer wants to restart
Char pronunciation: outlived more frameworks than your average enterprise monolith's tech debt
I pronounce char as “implementation-defined” - same as its signedness
Bike-shed the pronunciation all you like - once you treat char* as characters in a UTF-8 system, it’s pronounced “postmortem.”