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C works great, as an alternate to assembler, to bootstrap unix up on meager, 80s style, hardware. Based on things like the shell tools and languages like awk (
by Roboprog 10y ago
C works great, as an alternate to assembler, to bootstrap unix up on meager, 80s style, hardware.
Based on things like the shell tools and languages like awk (and other related descendants), I don't think even the unix creators meant for much application level work to be done in C, though, but by assembling components in higher level languages. Try telling that to The Management and all the macho/masochistic Real Programmers, though. Bounds checking? Memory management? (names you can identify to the left of the types, like in Algol, instead of to the right?) That's for sissies!
- pjmlp 10y agoWorse is that even the C creators saw the danger of using C without computer assisted validation and created lint in 1979. https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html Yet to this day, many still don't use any sort of static analysis tool.
- Roboprog 10y agoTo be honest, I seldom used lint, either, when I was starting out (although I suppose I cheated by using the Borland IDE in the early 90s). However, when using gcc in the mid to late 90s, it was just too easy to tack on -Wall (enable all warnings) to the options. No real excuse not to always check things, at that point.