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> Fortunately C is a much smaller and simpler language than C++. Isn't the C++ standard almost 1000 pages? The language specification itself is only about ~45
by nly 11y ago
> Fortunately C is a much smaller and simpler language than C++. Isn't the C++ standard almost 1000 pages?
The language specification itself is only about ~450 pages, the rest is library. It of course inherits all of the insanity of C on top of that (~170 pages of C language spec), which I'd argue brings a disproportionately large share of the pain.
Alex's point is that the standard doesn't really begin to give you an idea how hard it is to write an implementation, or make decisions about everything that's unspecified or ambiguous.
- _kst_ 11y agoThe C standard doesn't exactly "inherit" the 170 pages of the C language spec. As far as I know, the core C++ language (excluding the library) is defined entirely by the C++ standard, without reference to the C standard. It was certainly based on C, but the description doesn't depend on it. The C standard library is incorporated by reference (with a few tweaks) into the C++ standard. Of course the C++ standard library also includes a lot of material that isn't in the C standard library.