I first came across the notion of orthogonality for programming languages in Algol 68. Perhaps it's easiest to give examples of what it's not. At first in C yo

I first came across the notion of orthogonality for programming languages in Algol 68. Perhaps it's easiest to give examples of what it's not. At first in C you could only assign scalars; to assign a struct or union you had to call memcpy() or something like it. Eventually you could assign aggregates, but you still can't assign arrays unless you hide them in structs. It took a while before you could pass or return an aggregate. Exceptions of that sort are non-orthogonalities.