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A comment on On the history and justification of the C programming language. Parent comment

Re:On the history and justification of the C programming lan... by catnaroek on Thursday August 18, 2016 @12:58PM (#12314201)
> The undefined behavior is there primarily to account for the variation in platforms.

Honest question: Doesn't implementation-defined behavior suffice to address variations across platforms? Undefined behavior has far more drastic consequences: compilers are allowed to assume it simply won't happen.

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Re:On the history and justification of the C programming lan... by vonmoltke on Thursday August 18, 2016 @01:22PM (#12314476)
On further review, I think I was conflating undefined behavior with implementation-defined behavior. As pcwalton pointed out, though, in the early days there wasn't really a distinction between the two.
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