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I'd say the author's mental model of the nature of C as a programming language isn't accurate, not helped by efforts to standardise the language. It could be a
by somelamer567 2y ago
I'd say the author's mental model of the nature of C as a programming language isn't accurate, not helped by efforts to standardise the language.
It could be argued that C is little more of a defined programming language any more than assembly languages is. It's worth remembering that C was invented in part, to abstract away architectural differences, so that Unix could be ported to new platforms.
If you want 'standard' with a sane well-defined ABI that never changes, there are better choices in 2024.
- sumosudo 2y agoI'd doubt any 'mental model' the author possesses after seeing the hero banner on their website.
- bluetomcat 2y agoIt's a weakly-typed language that is rooted in the typeless, machine-word-oriented nature of BCPL. The "char" type in the early implementation for PDP-11 was just a feature to benefit from the byte-addressing capabilities of the machine. Everything else was an int. Pointers were compatible with ints without any conversion. Functions were implicitly returning int and taking an unspecified number of int parameters. As the language grew and attempted to cover a larger set of architectures, "int", "short", "long" started to mean different things on different machines. C99 attempted to fix the mess with stdint.h.