Re:Dennis Ritchie’s first C compiler (c. 1972)
by flohofwoe on Thursday March 11, 2021 @10:10AM
(#26424805)
It made more sense in an era when computers hadn't settled on 8-bit bytes yet. A better idea (not mine) is to separate the variable type from the storage type. There should be only one integer variable type with the same width as a CPU register (e.g. always 64-bit on today's CPUs), and storage types should be more flexible and explicit (e.g. 8, 16, 32, 64 bits, or even any bit-width).
Re:Dennis Ritchie’s first C compiler (c. 1972)
by jeffrallen on Thursday March 11, 2021 @08:31AM
(#26423773)
And that creat has no e on the end.
The real mistake in retrospect is that int and long are platform dependent. This is an amazing time sink when writing portable programs.
For some reason C programmers looked down on the exact width integer types for a long time.
The base types should have been exact width from the start, and the cool sounding names like int and long should have been typedefs.
In practice, I consider this a larger problem than the often cited NULL.