“C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success”

Re:“C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success” – Dennis R... by lumb63 on Sunday July 09, 2023 @10:19AM (#36654639)

Agreed on the dismay regarding type annotations. My opinion is that potentially misleading code which gives a sense of safety when none exists is worse than dangerous code. It lowers the programmer’s guards, which can lead to more bugs.

Integer overflow will result, I’m pretty sure. The largest value a signed 16 bit (so, 15 bit) can hold is 32767, IIRC.

I can see where that’s unexpected for people whose brains aren’t wired in powers of 2. This is one area where I think Rust improves upon C, with its availability of overflow detection in arithmetic. It’s unfortunately verbose, but it enables greater safety.

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Re:“C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success” – Dennis R... by skitter on Sunday July 09, 2023 @10:34AM (#36654766)

Not quite what I was getting at: On an implementation with 32-bit ints, the code is valid – the values get promoted to 32 bit, added and then truncated to 16 bit. Yet on a platform with 16-bit ints (and microchips & unusual platforms is a frequently stated reason for using C), the addition overflows and result in UB.

Luckily most other languages haven't decided to copy C's implicit promotion rules & target-dependant integer sizes.

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