hello.c is meant as the first program a new student encounters when learning C. At that point, the student has enough to worry about; writing code to a file, checking for syntactic errors, basic program structure, using the compiler, executing the binary, understanding what `#include <stdio.h>` means,...
Sure, we could update it:
// hello_v2.0.c
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <errno.h>
int main(void) {
printf("Hello, World!\n");
fflush(stdout);
if (errno != 0) {
fprintf(stderr, "error: %s\n", strerror(errno));
return errno;
}
}
But now we have different libraries, a multitude of external identifiers, control structures, blocks, return values, the concept of buffered streams, the concept of file-descriptors, the printf formatting language, program return values, boolean logic & conditionals,...
To someone who is already experienced in another language, that may not seem like a big deal, and isn't, but to someone who encounters the language for the first time, this is heavy stuff.
Sure, we could update it:
But now we have different libraries, a multitude of external identifiers, control structures, blocks, return values, the concept of buffered streams, the concept of file-descriptors, the printf formatting language, program return values, boolean logic & conditionals,...To someone who is already experienced in another language, that may not seem like a big deal, and isn't, but to someone who encounters the language for the first time, this is heavy stuff.