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The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

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Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#121

Post by stinos »

xamuel wrote: post #60
AshleysBrain wrote: post #31

I always get bashed for saying I like C++, but I genuinely don't get how C programmers manage without code like this: std::map > foo; One line and you've set up a nontrivial data structure with automatic memory management. No macro horrors (which are a diabolical way of implementing what C++ templates do well). Since you can code like C in C++, I'm not sure why more people don't use C-with-templates as a programming…

C guy here. I'm assuming you're serious and not being sarcastic... which is a nontrivial assumption, because that line you posted looks like something out of the foul depths of hell. You aren't going to run out of lines any time soon. Who cares whether your data structure definition is 1 line or 5?

well the thing is, it also works for std::vector, or std::vector, or anything you want. Last time I checked in C you'd have to either duplicate all your array code for each type or resort to something like void*. Only for that I'd use C++ (yes, you can use it without classes if you want).

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#122

Post by silentbicycle »

madhadron wrote: post #105
looser wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be the parent comment is referring to the Runtime-Library when using the term Virtual Machine.

No, I am referring to the virtual machine defined by the C language.

It may be less confusing to say "C's underlying model of computation".

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#123

Post by DigitalJack »

madhadron wrote: post #104
DigitalJack wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty ignorant about this stuff, so please don't think I'm trolling. I'm confused when you speak of a virtual machine with regard to C... can you explain what you mean by this? I had to wikipedia the Burroughs machine. I guess the big deal is that it's a stack machine? It looks very interesting and I plan to read more about it. But I guess I don't understand why that is a hindrance to C. The JVM is a stack machi…

The Burroughs was a stack machine, but that's only the beginning. Look at how it handled addressing hunks of memory. Bounds checked memory block references were a hardware type, and they were the only way to get a reference to a block of memory. So basically, null pointers didn't exist at the hardware level, nor out of bounds writes to arrays or strings. Similarly, code and data were distinguished in memory (by high…

I'll have to read more about the memory references to get a feel for that.

However it speaks of a compiler for ALGOL... it was compiled down to machine instructions. Assembly is just a representation of machine instructions, so I don't see how it can be said to not have an assembly language.

Maybe nobody ever bothered to write an assembler, but that doesn't mean that it somehow directly executes ALGOL.

Thanks for your replies, you have given me some food for thought.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems_instruc...

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#124

Post by opk »

madhadron wrote: post #112
niggler wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

modern FORTRAN is absolutely horrific, to the extent that F77 is far more popular than more recent flavors (like F90 or F95). It suffers from the same types of problems that the author identifies in C++ and Java. As for standard library, I learned from K&R and have never been surprised by the library (insofar as I can reasonably predict what will happen, given the guidelines). I cannot say that about the C++ standard…

FORTRAN 77 is far more popular because it took so long for a GNU FORTRAN 9x compiler to appear, and meanwhile there are millions of lines of FORTRAN 77 in enormous libraries. The problem with the standard library is that it is tiny and its basic types are often ill designed. Certainly it's fairly consistent, and so fairly unsurprising, but that's not the argument.

It also has to do with the type of people that program in FORTRAN. They often have backgrounds more grounded in Maths or Physics than computers. I don't think the GNU compiler had much to do with it because people using FORTRAN are more likely to be using something else (we use Solaris Studio where I work).

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#125

Post by hga »

niggler wrote: post #71
madhadron wrote: post #53

Oh for heavens' sakes. Yet more ignorance. A more realistic view of C: - C is straightforward to compile into fast machine code...on a PDP-11. Its virtual machine does not match modern architectures very well, and its explicitness about details of its machine mean FORTRAN compilers typically produce faster code. The C virtual machine does not provide an accurate model of why your code is fast on a modern machine. The…

modern FORTRAN is absolutely horrific, to the extent that F77 is far more popular than more recent flavors (like F90 or F95). It suffers from the same types of problems that the author identifies in C++ and Java. As for standard library, I learned from K&R and have never been surprised by the library (insofar as I can reasonably predict what will happen, given the guidelines). I cannot say that about the C++ standard…

I thought the major point is that it's a "high level" language, high enough that a compiler can do serious optimizations. Read Fran Allen's interview in Coders at Work, she despairs of writing efficient compilers/programs in C because it's so low level.

Now, sometimes you need that low level access, but C is used way beyond those niches.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#126

Post by eropple »

silentbicycle wrote: post #122
madhadron wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I am referring to the virtual machine defined by the C language.

It may be less confusing to say "C's underlying model of computation".

Given the way that LLVM has come onto the scene, I'm not sure I'd agree. C defines assumptions in the programming environment and does not guarantee that it at all resembles the underlying hardware. You are never coding to the hardware (unless you are doing heinous magic), you're coding to C. That's a "virtual machine" to me.

The concept of C as a virtual machine isn't new (I first heard it around 2006 or so? I don't think it was new then) and it's much more descriptive than referring to its "model of computation".

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#127

Post by pcwalton »

geophile wrote: post #46

C/C++/Java. A programmer's version of Rock/Paper/Scissors. Ignoring pre-history (BASIC, FORTRAN, PDP-11 assembler, Z80 assembler, Pascal), I started out in C, many years ago. I found myself using macros and libraries to provide useful combinations of state and functions. I was reinventing objects and found C++. I was a very happy user of C++ for many years, starting very early on (cfront days). But I was burned by th…

You may like Rust (disclaimer: I work on Rust). You get the choice of manual or automatic memory management, but no matter which you choose you don't sacrifice safety. The language is simpler than C++ but can be about as fast as idiomatic C++ and supports a bunch of higher-level features like closures and generics.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#128

Post by to3m »

mbq wrote: post #110
AshleysBrain wrote: post #31

I always get bashed for saying I like C++, but I genuinely don't get how C programmers manage without code like this: std::map > foo; One line and you've set up a nontrivial data structure with automatic memory management. No macro horrors (which are a diabolical way of implementing what C++ templates do well). Since you can code like C in C++, I'm not sure why more people don't use C-with-templates as a programming…

I bet in 99% of cases using such structure is a nonsense overhead, and in 85% the code relaying on it can be written without a single heap allocation.

One man's nonsense overhead is another's labour-saving modern convenience ;)

(I like to write my code without heap allocations, but when you need an array of arrays of strings, indexed by another string, it doesn't half get a bit annoying to code up.)

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#129

Post by pcwalton »

xamuel wrote: post #60
AshleysBrain wrote: post #31

I always get bashed for saying I like C++, but I genuinely don't get how C programmers manage without code like this: std::map > foo; One line and you've set up a nontrivial data structure with automatic memory management. No macro horrors (which are a diabolical way of implementing what C++ templates do well). Since you can code like C in C++, I'm not sure why more people don't use C-with-templates as a programming…

C guy here. I'm assuming you're serious and not being sarcastic... which is a nontrivial assumption, because that line you posted looks like something out of the foul depths of hell. You aren't going to run out of lines any time soon. Who cares whether your data structure definition is 1 line or 5?

Binary search trees cannot be implemented in 5 (reasonably-wide) lines of C.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#130

Post by looser »

madhadron wrote: post #105
looser wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be the parent comment is referring to the Runtime-Library when using the term Virtual Machine.

No, I am referring to the virtual machine defined by the C language.

If C makes use of a virtual machine, then why we have to recompile it for every new machine/platform?
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