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We will be hobbled with these decisions for a long time precisely because the complete package of trade offs the designers made were so successful. If they had
by compiler-guy 6y ago
We will be hobbled with these decisions for a long time precisely because the complete package of trade offs the designers made were so successful.
If they had gone for wart-free on properly powered hardware, they would be stuck back in Multics land or living with the gnu Hurd—cancelled for being over budget or moving so slowly that projects that actually accomplish what the users need overtake them.
Do I wish that C had fixed its operator precedence problem? Sure. But the trade offs as a total package make a lot of sense.
- colejohnson66 6y agoIs there an explanation on why C’s operator precedence is weird? Such as: why does the bitwise AND have higher precedence than logical AND?
- briantakita 6y ago> why does the bitwise AND have higher precedence than logical AND? Why is this precedence weird? Bitwise AND tends to be used to transform data while a logical AND tends to be used for control flow.
- colejohnson66 6y agoI meant equals having a higher precedence than bitwise AND. As in: if (x & 2 == 2) ...is actually parsed as: if (x & (2 == 2)) ...which isn’t intuitive.
- compiler-guy 6y agoSee the above example from dmr himself
- compiler-guy 6y agoThere is, and it is amusing “In retrospect it would have been better to go ahead and change the precedence of & to higher than ==, but it seemed safer just to split & and && without moving & past an existing operator. (After all, we had several hundred kilobytes of source code, and maybe 3 installations....)“ https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/dmr-on-or.html https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/dmr-on-or.html
- pjmlp 6y agoSome would say, https://multicians.org/history.html https://multicians.org/history.html Instead we pile mitigations on top of mitigations, with hardware memory tagging being the last hope to fix it.