On Sat, Jan 1, 2022 at 8:20 PM Larry McVoy <
lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
I'm almost speechless. My progression was Basic, Pascal, C (and later
Fortran, Lisp, no Cobol, I did an Ada Compiler so Ada I guess). Then
on to awk, perl, tcl, I tried to like C++ but couldn't, tried to like
Rust, Go, D, and couldn't.
If you think any of those other languages remotely approach the elegance
of C, I just don't know what to say.
Elegance? C? I think not. Lisp, _that's_ elegant.
LISP is all about the syntax. It was completely opaque until that moment when prefix notation clicked and it was all clear...
C is beautiful, you look at the code and you can see what the hardware
will be doing but it isn't assembler.
Not really. You see what the hardware would be doing if it were a PDP-11. That's not the same thing at all.
Read the CHERI papers to find out that C is just doing approximately what you want / think is going on... unless you've been burned by UB that you thought you knew... At least compilers are getting stricter about flagging it, much to the annoyance of anybody with a code base more than a couple years old...
Warner