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> "Someone told me back in high school that 'C is just shorthand for assembly'" That was true for the PDP-11 that the article series mentions and it was true f
by ThrowawayR2 7y ago
> "Someone told me back in high school that 'C is just shorthand for assembly'"
That was true for the PDP-11 that the article series mentions and it was true for the early home computers of the '70s and '80s but it became increasingly less true as processors became more and more complicated under the hood. That's kind of the point of the article series but it's not as big a deal as the author makes it out to be because it was already people writing in C were aware of.
- CalChris 7y agoI really like your first point, paraphrasing, that 'C is how the PDP-11 worked, then'. But as for now, I don't agree that most people writing C are in any way really aware of this shift. Instead, I think C is how the computer works is their abstraction level. Unless your homepage is Godbolt's Compiler Explorer [1], you see C, you think C, moreso if it's C++. [1] https://godbolt.org/ https://godbolt.org/
- 6keZbCECT2uB 7y agoAs other people have pointed out, rather than C being more unlike assembly, processors are more unlike assembly. As such, the abstractions of C map pretty well to a theoretical assembly, even if optimization changes that precise mapping. A possible exception to this is the multicore semantics that are apart of each architecture aren't particularly well represented.