Author: David Rasmussen
Date: 17:05:48 01/11/03
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On January 11, 2003 at 11:30:44, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >Yes, but not quite like you think. C is _great_ for working on a specific >architecture. Efficient. Easy to write good code. Readable. Etc. > >C is _not_ great for writing code that has to run on multiple architectures. >For a comparison, try FORTRAN. I have run FORTRAN code on 16, 32 and 64 bit >machines with _zero_ changes to the source, because I could speficy how long >a variable had to be, precisely, without worrying about "does the architecture >support this?" > >Yes C is good. And yes, it _could_ be better, if only the standards committee >would write a _standard_ with no missing piecse... > > C is an ugly language by any standards. It just happens to be the language that the world has spent the most time making tools and implementations for. Given the strength and goals of C, and the years of experience with it's vast amount of weaknesses, a much cleaner, simpler, faster, more effecient, more expressible, less error prone, and simply much better language could be made today that meats the same goals and more. But the focus of language design today is not on systems programming languages like C. And on the other hand, which is much worse, people use C for all sorts of problems where much superior alternatives exist. /David
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