Re:C’s Biggest Mistake (2009)
by moon4u on Monday September 14, 2020 @06:14AM
(#24468542)
> Oh, how they dare argue with WALTER BRIGHT. The hubris!
With all due respect, but if someone says something invalid, the fact that they have authority on a subject does not mean that we should agree.
As far as I understand the article (And I'm not the great Walter Bright, so I may be wrong) - the author states that "void foo(char a[..])" is better syntax than "void foo(size_t s, char a[])" but does not provide any arguments for it. Furthermore, the author initially fails to mention that there has been an attempt to fix the array-to-pointer-decay issue, when discussing "C's Biggest Mistake".
So, yeah, the author may be right that this has been C's biggest mistake. I don't know whether that is true or not, I do not have his experience. It is certainly true that this mistake would be high on rankings of all mistakes that C did. Still, the initial "sleight of hand" move followed by unsubstantiated argument leads to a post with the quality similar to that of a twitter post. Maybe even worse, since, you know, it's posted on a place other than twitter, so we are actually talking about it as if it was something serious.
With all due respect, but if someone says something invalid, the fact that they have authority on a subject does not mean that we should agree.
As far as I understand the article (And I'm not the great Walter Bright, so I may be wrong) - the author states that "void foo(char a[..])" is better syntax than "void foo(size_t s, char a[])" but does not provide any arguments for it. Furthermore, the author initially fails to mention that there has been an attempt to fix the array-to-pointer-decay issue, when discussing "C's Biggest Mistake".
So, yeah, the author may be right that this has been C's biggest mistake. I don't know whether that is true or not, I do not have his experience. It is certainly true that this mistake would be high on rankings of all mistakes that C did. Still, the initial "sleight of hand" move followed by unsubstantiated argument leads to a post with the quality similar to that of a twitter post. Maybe even worse, since, you know, it's posted on a place other than twitter, so we are actually talking about it as if it was something serious.