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I love stories like this. All the history behind a very young but rich science. For example I always assumed C came from a strong typing background and its pre
by cntlzw 9y ago
I love stories like this. All the history behind a very young but rich science.
For example I always assumed C came from a strong typing background and its premises was always about being portable. Neither of them are true.
- flavio81 9y ago> I always assumed C came from a strong typing background C is notoriously weakly typed. There are lots of implicit casts that will automatically be applied. And (void *) is your door to freedom from types (this can be a good thing in some cases, of course.)
- marssaxman 9y agoNo, indeed! This obsession with "undefined behavior" and the desire to eliminate it from the language spec is something recent; when I learned C, we all just understood such gaps in the spec to be places where the compiler writer would do whatever was reasonable for the target platform.
- Koshkin 9y agoC was designed to be more portable than assembler. In fact, that was one of its raisons d'être. It is not hard to imagine that other programming languages (COBOL, Ada, Common Lisp, Perl) could be more portable than C, but still.