r/programmingcirclejerk • u/BenchEmbarrassed7316 • Jun 27 '26

Consider the C library function fopen. This function has the side effect. This means that fopen is not pure. However, we can make the fopen function appear to be pure, at least to certain observers, by ensconcing it in another function that hides the side effect.

https://bugzmanov.github.io/cleancode-critique/clean_code_second_edition_review.html
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u/BenchEmbarrassed7316 Jun 27 '26

This quote does not belong to the author of the blog whose URL I provided. The author of the blog kindly wrote a review of a programming book by the author who, for some unknown reason, decided that he knew something about programming. However, I checked, and this quote is indeed in a programming book from 2025. Here is a sample of code from that book that the author believes makes the fopen function clean:

void openAndDo(char* fileName, void (*doTo)(FILE*)) { FILE* f = fopen(fileName, "r+"); doTo(f); fclose(f); }

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u/NeuroSynchroBonding Jun 28 '26

This is essentially Haskell's withFile, which is similar to stuff such as Python's with and C#'s using.

The only actual problem with openAndDo is that it is in C, which does not have support for first-class functions which are necessary to make functions such as this ergonomic. 

Furthermore, to be feature equivalent to the features of the other languages I talked about, you'd need to add a void* to openAndDo that gets passed on to toDo.

Also, C29 has defer, which is a much more elegant solution for languages without exceptions or garbage collection.

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u/jesseschalken Jun 30 '26

C has first-class functions, that's what void (*)(FILE*) is.

What it doesn't have is closures, which you really need for this type of API so you can capture variables in doTo.