3 ms·
C can be quite complex once you get into all the abstractions it's using. And even for newbies I think the whole syntax around pointers is unnecessarily confusi
by ChrisSD 7y ago
C can be quite complex once you get into all the abstractions it's using. And even for newbies I think the whole syntax around pointers is unnecessarily confusing (or at least people are often confused by it in a way they usually aren't when learning assembly). Not to mention how many keywords and symbols are overloaded and depend on their context for meaning.
- AlchemistCamp 7y agoTo be fair, I never learned it in its heyday and even now, I've just worked on some toy utilities and an 8088 emulator. I've never used it for work or open source or anything "real".
- carterehsmith 7y ago>> C can be quite complex once you get into all the abstractions it's using. Perhaps you were referring to C++, or some newer C dialect? What I mean is, the K&R C had very few (if any) abstractions, other than those defined by preprocessor. Like, you could look a the C code and pretty much "see" what the assembly code would look like after compiler did its work.
- ChrisSD 7y agoYeah, on reflection you're right about that. At the time when the language matched the hardware the abstraction was much more literal. It was only when they diverged that optimizing compilers were needed and all the complexity was introduced in order to maintain the fiction that the hardware was still as simple as PDP-11.