Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. I've long since lost track of which shiny new systems language we're supposed to be using.
What do you think about D? ;)
D seems to be targeting C++ more than it does C.
ISO C is increasingly moronic
171–175 of 175 posts
Re: ISO C is increasingly moronic
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think a new language (Go, maybe?) will take C's place, given your distaste for ISO's handling of the standard?
I doubt any language will replace C ever, given the penetration it has, but maybe we could get a better C2X than the crap C1X seems to be. It would require a significant fraction of programmers to agree with me that C1X is crap in the first place.
how true is it that one reason C is increasingly unlikely to be replaced is that cpus these days specifically optimise the performance of C-compiler-generated code?
Re: ISO C is increasingly moronic
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you're just going to extract the values once, why not just write the code to actually do that instead of trying to play tricks with memcpy()? Because it's more expressive, doesn't cost performance, and is less error-prone than writing field extraction code manually. And because it's the type of processing people actually use C for. > Those tricks won't even work in many cases where certain fields indicate the le…
It seems that the preferred implementation these days is to write an LL parser by hand, if most production compilers and interpreters are anything to go by.
There are some well-publicized LL parsers - C# for example - but I'm not convinced by "most production compilers and interpreters."
Re: ISO C is increasingly moronic
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
First of all: You're wrong, the compatibility is the other way around: The old code will have to include if they used the "noreturn" compiler-specific keyword, while waiting for the glacial ISO WG progress. Second: There are two kinds of compatibility: Forwards compatbility and backwards compatibilty. There is a finite number of existing programs whereas the number of future programs to be written is unbounded and ve…
If you don't value backwards compatibility, then perhaps you should not use a 40-year-old language with a standards committee that does value it.
Dennis Ritchie, C's creator, along with Ken Thompson, Unix' creator, and other Bell Labs people from the Computing Science Research Center thought the C standardization committee was wrong, so the Plan9 C compiler[1,2] is not ANSI compatible. Not only the standard library is nothing alike, the language itself is slightly changed in an incompatible way.
Re: ISO C is increasingly moronic
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's entirely fair. Sometimes who someone is, is a decisive factor in what arguments they present. It can give them a valuable jolt of insight to point out that they present those arguments because they are missing part of the view. Of course you should also explain why the arguments in themselves are wrong, but the main argument may be "you've never experienced X; those that have tend to argue Y, bec…
It's very easy to make those arguments just by saying "From my experience doing X, you're wrong because..." without speculating about what the other person hasn't done.
on the contrary, I find communicating in this way a rather reliable method of talking in short hand. I was happy to be wrong, since phk illuminated another reason why some people may advocate breaking compatibility, and it is easy to get to his core arguments once his credentials were established.