3 ms·
It'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 ju
by bluetomcat 2y ago
It'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.