3 ms·
C was created for solving a very practical and specific problem: making the newly born UNIX operating system easily portable across different architectures. It
by StephenFalken 12y ago
C was created for solving a very practical and specific problem: making the newly born UNIX operating system easily portable across different architectures. It was an impressive success on that challenge.
That means most of the decisions Dennis Ritchie (with the help of others) took when designing the language were the right ones for solving the problem at hand [1], otherwise the language wouldn't have survived as strongly as it did. [2]
[1] http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/chist.pdf http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/chist.pdf
[2] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....
- nine_k 12y agoC has many upsides. Unfortunately, the pointer declaration syntax, and the declaration syntax in general, is not one of them. Go, being very C-like in many syntactic aspects, reworks this, and does so for a reason.
- nkurz 12y agoIf you happen to have the whole afternoon free, this 850+ post thread on comp.arch eventually leads to some wonderful discussion of how modern C has (for better or worse) changed from this original mission to "something else": http://compgroups.net/comp.arch/if-it-were-easy/2993157 http://compgroups.net/comp.arch/if-it-were-easy/2993157
- slashnull 12y agoHoly cow this looks awesome