The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C • Hacker News Board

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#391

Post by panduwana » Sat, Jan 12, 2013, 3:46 AM UTC

ericdschmidt wrote: post #347

betterunix wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Turns out clear thought in any language is the main thing." No, the ability to express your thought clearly is the main thing -- and that is why languages matter. If your code is cluttered with pointer-juggling, error-checking conditional statements, and the other hoops C forces you to jump through, then your code is not clear. Try expressing your code clearly in BF, then get back to me about this "languages don't m…

Can both of you guys just get back to me later? Kinda busy now.

Sure. RBTree in C is that ugly. Take your time.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#392

Post by unlogic » Sat, Jan 12, 2013, 8:22 AM UTC

xradionut wrote: post #203

MichaelGG wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's being deliberately obtuse. How many languages are lower level than C, besides assembly? If your ranking has every language in the "high level" camp, then your ranking is poorly calibrated.

Forth is the only language I'd place between C and assembly.

Actually Forth is much higher level than C since it allows to define abstractions of any complexity in itself.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#393

Post by chadzawistowski » Mon, Jan 14, 2013, 4:13 AM UTC

octopus wrote: post #247

chadzawistowski wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difficulty of writing static analysis software does depend on the language, though. In Visual Studio, for example, intellisense and autocompletion are vastly superior in C# compared to C++. As a matter of interest, which C IDEs are you referring to? I'd like to check them out.

Try Xcode 4.5.x (wich uses Clang as the default C compiler). VS2012 has similar capabilities for C++.

VS2012 is actually the IDE I was thinking of when I said VS C++ support is inferior to C#'s. While there is intellisense, it does not display any documentation. The closest thing it offers is variable names for a method's arguments.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#394

Post by shurane » Mon, Jan 21, 2013, 6:50 PM UTC

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…

Could you give a few links to papers on Burroughs systems and the Connection Machine? Is this article on LtU [1] and Daniel Hill's Connection Machine paper and book the sources I ought to look at?

Titles to some papers or some comparisons on a mailing list would be awesome to have if you know any off the top of your head.

[1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/87