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Know Your Language: C Rules Everything Around Me (Part One)

2 pointsby edrocheover 9 years ago

1 comment

kjs3over 9 years ago
Really awful article.<p><i>Windows 10 may prove to be the de facto operating system of the Internet of Things</i><p>That&#x27;s not even wrong...<p><i>Once the language had been named, things happened very fast and C started to look much more like the C we use today, including the addition of boolean operators like &amp;&amp; and ||....These are extremely crucial programming building blocks for not just C but most any language since.</i><p>Since C? Booleans? You mean like the and&#x2F;or&#x2F;not operators in Fortran (1957), COBOL (1958), or Algol-60 (where they were even represented by funky characters) to name a few? Simula-67 even had a boolean type which C didn&#x27;t pick up.<p><i>The C Programming Language, dubbed the &quot;white book,&quot;</i><p>Is there anyone who actually called it anything other than &quot;K&amp;R&quot;? I&#x27;ve sure never heard it called the &quot;white book&quot;.<p><i>In 1983, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) starting working on a standard specification for C, with the result ratified finally in 1989 as ANSI C. This basically enshrined a One True C, where programmers could be assured that the language would behave the same no matter how or where it was implemented.</i><p>I&#x27;m dubious the author has never programmed in C for anything other than x86. He&#x27;s certainly not tried to use ANSI C on, say a 36-bit or 60-bit machine. Or a Harvard architecture machine. Or ported to an ISA with different endianness or different load&#x2F;store alignment restrictions. ANSI C doesn&#x27;t even define the size of a byte beyond &quot;at least 8 bits&quot;. Need more? Google &quot;undefined behavior in ansi c&quot; for a good laugh.