Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 08:30:44 01/11/03
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On January 11, 2003 at 02:10:45, Miguel A. Ballicora wrote: >On January 10, 2003 at 21:34:38, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>>Then you sacrifice performance. Particularly for machines that do not have >>>8 bit chars and weird configurations! The performance hit in those cases is must >>>be huge. You cannot have 100% portability and best performance at the same time. >>>C gives, IMHO, the best compromise. History showed that. >> >>Actually it doesn't show that. C was developed 30+ years ago on a very simple >>architecture. The basic language structure has survived for a long time, but >>the data types (particularly integer) have really lagged behind, and kludges >>like "long long" are the result of short-sightedness... > >Well, it survived 30+ years, so history is saying something. IMHO, the data >types had a lot to do with the success of the language. It allowed to write >portable and efficient code for diversed machines with completely different word >sizes, and I did not make that up, it really happened. 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... > >The bottom line is that you do not like the data type structures but I do. >It is a matter of taste. It is more than taste. You might not be as concerned about portability as I am. But in my case, portability is an important issue, and C has some distinct problems in that area. Problems that _could_ be addressed by standards. > >Miguel
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