Deep C (2011) - Hackdot

Re:Deep C (2011) by Koshkin on Sunday October 22, 2017 @11:51AM (#15527312)

There is nothing especially deep about C. Its design is intentionally extremely primitive, almost to the point of being a thin layer of syntactic sugar on top of assembly. In fact, the creation of C was a reaction to a real deep sea monstrosity that had been gaining wide-spread popularity at the time, PL/I - a devilish mixture of COBOL, Fortran, and even assembly, all dressed in a horrible ad-hoc syntax, yet intended for the use in both systems and application programming - basically, C++ of its time. PL/I was selected as the implementation language of the Multics operating system which, in turn, precipitated the creation of UNIX.

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Re:Deep C (2011) by shakna on Monday October 23, 2017 @12:25AM (#15530715)

PL/I is probably the most unpleasant language I have ever had to deal with. It makes C, without warnings, look as safe as a nuclear bunker.

The best quote that resonates with me, has to come from an unattributed UNIX fortune file:

> Speaking as someone who has delved into the intricacies of PL/I, I am sure that only Real Men could have written such a machine-hogging, cycle-grabbing, all-encompassing monster. Allocate an array and free the middle third? Sure! Why not? Multiply a character string times a bit string and assign the result to a float decimal? Go ahead! Free a controlled variable procedure parameter and reallocate it before passing it back? Overlay three different types of variable on the same memory location? Anything you say! Write a recursive macro? Well, no, but Real Men use rescan. How would a language so obviously designed and written by Real Men not be intended for Real Man use?

C, with it's almost-assembly and fairly predictable semantics was an absolute blessing.

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Re:Deep C (2011) by pjmlp on Sunday October 22, 2017 @02:18PM (#15528139)

As a consequence we have secure IBM i (PL/I), z/OS (PL/S), and Unisys ClearCase (NEWP) with OS features not yet present in modern OSes, while C coders are the job security of exploit writers.

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