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To reinforce this, I still believe C is one of the most elegant syntax's for a "portable assembler". There are many dark corners of C, take for example pointers

• bogomipz 10y ago
  This is an interesting read, thanks. However I do not understand the opening sentence: "Pointers in the C language are more abstract than pointers in the hardware, and the compiler may surprise developers that think that pointers in C work in the same way as pointers in the CPU." What are pointers in the hardware? I am not sure what is being said. Any ideas?
  • cesarb 10y ago
    > What are pointers in the hardware? Under current "flat address space" architectures, a pointer in the hardware is nothing more than a memory address, represented as an integer. That is, a pointer with value 0x12345678 is the address of the memory 0x12345678 bytes above the start of the virtual address space. In the C language, pointers are more abstract: they have to point to either within an object, or one past the end of an object. This is because there are architectures like segmented architectures, where a pointer has two parts (segment and offset) and cannot be treated just like an integer, and the same C program should in theory be able to also run in these architectures without change.
    • bogomipz 10y ago
      Thanks for pointing out the alternative of segmented memory, this now makes sense. Cheers.