I have been working with robotc for a few weeks now and am very curious about what the major differences are between RobotC and C/C++. has anybody worked with both languages before? and if so, what reference sites would you recommend for someone transitioning from robotC to C? Thanks in advance.

The biggest difference is lack of pointers To transition from ROBOTC to regular C (or C++) there aren't really any guides. You'll need to be prepare yourself for a pretty steep learning curve, though. Embedded C/C++ programming is a lot more challenging than ROBOTC.

Is there a specific reason you are looking to move away from ROBOTC? Perhaps C/C++ is not the answer to your problems, there is also a great Java implementation for the NXT.

- Xander

i was not planning to stop using robotc, i just wanted to get involved in computer programming. Thank you for the reply

How so? The pointers are broken, yes, but you can pass a variable by reference, so isn't that pointers, kinda?

RobotC also doesn't allow multiple assignment operators in a single statement, which other languages allow (I think):

They're not broken, they just haven't been implemented. No breaking what's not there

As for using the multiple assignment statements, I tend not to use those because it doesn't make my code any more readable and it's not more efficient.

- Xander

Pass by reference is nowhere as useful as full pointer support. For example, you can store pointers in a structure but you can't store "references" in a structure. Without pointers, it is extremely difficult to implement object oriented programming. I tried doing it without pointers but the code is a mess. For example, to represent multiple instances of an object, I had to create a global array of structures. Instead of passing the pointer of an object around, I had to pass the array index around as the "object handle". All the functions that take "object handles" must have access to the global structure arrays. What a mess! In addition, full pointer support will also help in implementing cooperative multi-tasking where I need to do event-driven callbacks. This requires function pointers. Without it, I had to hard code callback function names in the task manager. Again, it is a mess!