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I think Dennis would love what Rust provides, it took just 45 years to fix noalias with a new language.
by xiphias2 6y ago
I think Dennis would love what Rust provides, it took just 45 years to fix noalias with a new language.
- pjmlp 6y agoI advise reading the manual of NEWP, released in 1961. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEWP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEWP And also the C history, written by Dennis. https://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/3e/docs/chistory.html https://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/3e/docs/chistory.html C took over the world thanks to UNIX, while Denis and Thompson decided to ignore what came the decade before. > Although we entertained occasional thoughts about implementing one of the major languages of the time like Fortran, PL/I, or Algol 68, such a project seemed hopelessly large for our resources: much simpler and smaller tools were called for. All these languages influenced our work, but it was more fun to do things on our own. And they were aware of some caveats > To encourage people to pay more attention to the official language rules, to detect legal but suspicious constructions, and to help find interface mismatches undetectable with simple mechanisms for separate compilation, Steve Johnson adapted his pcc compiler to produce lint [Johnson 79b], which scanned a set of files and remarked on dubious constructions. Problem is that unlike Dennis and Thompson, static analysis is a foreign words for most C devs (current surveys place it around 11%).