Pointers Are More Abstract Than You Might Expect in C

Re:Pointers Are More Abstract Than You Might Expect in C by sureaboutthis on Monday July 02, 2018 @09:33AM (#17441455)

Some of your complaints could be said about assembly,too, but are you wanting to get rid of that, too? Some of your other complaints are about how processors and other hardware work, not C. In many ways, you are asking for C to be like other languages but then it wouldn't be C and all the advantages it does have.

If you get rid of C, you get rid of most of the software your operating system runs on and that begs the question you need to ask yourself: if C is so bad, why is everyone using it?

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Re:Pointers Are More Abstract Than You Might Expect in C by bluejekyll on Monday July 02, 2018 @09:57AM (#17441626)

> if C is so bad, why is everyone using it?

Don't confuse success for correctness, survivorship bias is something to consider here. As others will surely point out, when C was written, there were other languages available at the time that were as fast, but much safer.

In many ways C won, because Unix won, to talk about them separately ignores how important both were to each others success. (Yes, other operating systems adopted C as well, but Unix is it's foundation)

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Re:Pointers Are More Abstract Than You Might Expect in C by pjmlp on Monday July 02, 2018 @10:59AM (#17442169)

Some mainframes like Unisys ClearPath don't have Assembly support at all, zero, nada, all necessary low level primitives are exposed as compiler intrisics.

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