Some Books on C

I have gathered such introductory books on the C programming language as I own or could borrow. The result is an eight-storey tower. A quick scan shows that I could easily buy another half dozen, but I doubt whether that would yield any new insights.

For most teachers “an introductory programming book with C” is an oxymoron. The extreme wing in this school of thought consider only designedly friendly languages suitable for an introduction to programming. BASIC is an early example. My current favourite friendly language is Python [1]. But the mainstream of teachers of introductory programming has settled on Java as a compromise between friendliness and attractiveness to prospective employers.

Why does C not have an exponentiation operator?

The most authoritative source for an answer to the question in the title would be Dennis Ritchie. Next best is Bjarne Stroustrup:

The semantics of C operators should be simple to the point where each corresponds to a machine instruction on a typical computer. An exponentiation operator doesn’t meet this criterion. [1], page 247

Stroustrup’s criterion needs to be taken with a grain of salt. For example, the assignment operator does not meet the criterion: a = b takes a LOAD and a STORE. In this case the criterion translates to: “should correspond to no more than a LOAD and a STORE. But Stroustrup was onto something, because we can tweak his answer to:

The semantics of C operators should be simple to the point where they each compile to code that is as fast as what one can write in assembler.