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Re:The Descent to C (2013) by LeifCarrotson on Friday September 03, 2021 @12:17PM (#28406167)
Most programmers probably weren't aware of this, but no true Scottish C programmer would be unaware of it.

If you want to manipulate memory directly - which is risky though sometimes useful - C is one of the best languages in which to do it. Memory addresses are numbers, and C will let you work with those numbers in whatever way you want: add, subtract, multiply, divide... and if you didn't shudder at the suggestion of dividing a pointer because there are very, very few reasons to do so then C is not the language for you!

If you don't want to manipulate memory directly, you probably shouldn't be using C; stick with a nice garbage-collected, type-safe, object-oriented, cross-platform language. If you do want to manipulate memory directly, but you want more guarantees on what you can do with pointers, try Rust.

Re:The Descent to C (2013) by bluejekyll on Friday September 03, 2021 @12:22PM (#28406209)
Just wanted to clarify that Rust allows for the same manipulation as C, it just all has to happen in the context of an unsafe code block. I think your comment might be taken to imply that Rust isn’t as capable as C in that regard.
Re:The Descent to C (2013) by pjmlp on Saturday September 04, 2021 @05:21PM (#28419358)
Plenty of languages allow for the same memory handling capabilities, including BASIC.