Re: Another spinoza challenge


"*** T. Winter" <***.Winter@xxxxxx> wrote in message
In article <821cb0a0-35a7-4226-9782-> spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@xxxxxxxxx>
writes:
...
I will so presume. This is because the language is just a bunch of
rather foolish decisions made in 1970 and compounded by unethical
decisions made in 1999.

We know your derision of RH well enough, it is not necessary to compound
it.
On the other hand, what was unethical about the decisions in 1999, what
was
foolish about the decisions in 1970? They did not match what you wanted?

In 1970 some language design decisions were made by a couple of guys in a
telephone company computer lab. They probably never imagined that the
language would ever be used except for limited internal purposes.
One of the main decisions they made was to use raw addresses as a basic
type. This has had profound implications. It keeps C close to the machine,
it also means that buffer overruns have to be prevented by programmers
keeping tight control of flow logic. It also means that the pointer aliasing
problem can introduce all sorts of subtle difficulties into code. It is a
good question whether this was or was not the right decision, but you can
certainly argue it was "foolish".

The work of the standardisation committees was very different. By now C had
achieved a status as a major, if not the major, general-purpose programming
language. As always, social and therefore political considerations enter
into these types of deliberations. So a narrow technical critique may well
miss the real point. If you disagree with the committee's response to some
of these socio-political pressures upon it, you have the right to label its
behaviour unethical. The fact that the C99 standard has failed means that
something has gone wrong somewhere, which I think we all acknowledge.


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