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Know Your Language: C Rules Everything Around Me (Part One)
- kjs3 11y agoReally awful article. Windows 10 may prove to be the de facto operating system of the Internet of Things That's not even wrong... Once the language had been named, things happened very fast and C started to look much more like the C we use today, including the addition of boolean operators like && and ||....These are extremely crucial programming building blocks for not just C but most any language since. Since C? Booleans? You mean like the and/or/not operators in Fortran (1957), COBOL (1958), or Algol-60 (where they were even represented by funky characters) to name a few? Simula-67 even had a boolean type which C didn't pick up. The C Programming Language, dubbed the "white book," Is there anyone who actually called it anything other than "K&R"? I've sure never heard it called the "white book". In 1983, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) starting working on a standard specification for C, with the result ratified finally in 1989 as ANSI C. This basically enshrined a One True C, where programmers could be assured that the language would behave the same no matter how or where it was implemented. I'm dubious the author has never programmed in C for anything other than x86. He's certainly not tried to use ANSI C on, say a 36-bit or 60-bit machine. Or a Harvard architecture machine. Or ported to an ISA with different endianness or different load/store alignment restrictions. ANSI C doesn't even define the size of a byte beyond "at least 8 bits". Need more? Google "undefined behavior in ansi c" for a good laugh.