Didier Kryn said on Sun, 11 Aug 2024 13:57:31 +0200

>Le 11/08/2024 à 04:06, Steve Litt a écrit :
>> I think it's a pretty darn good language. It makes sense, its syntax
>> is pretty guessable (except for pointers to functions), and it's a
>> small language that's easily learned.
>>
>     Yes, you think you learned it... but sometime you discover you
>missed something. And there's a lot one can miss in C. There's a lot
>of subtelties, like in automatic type promotion,

You learn that, and personally I always gcc -Wall .

>for example, like the
>difference between static and automatic variables,

Everyone knows that, and uses it a lot.

>static constants
>and automatic constants,

I'll admit that the preceding is tricky when inside the parentheses of
a function declaration.

>embedded functions...

I'll admit I've never done embedded programming, so I don't know about
embedded functions. If you happen to mean "nested functions", why bother?

>And this horrible thing
>of using the equal sign for assignment:
>
>When you write
>
>x = 1;
>
>...
>
>x = 2;
>
>     Any one having a notion of mathematics will call you a liar.

Yes, this took me 10 minutes to assimilate when I learned Fortran in
school.

>And
> it
>forces you to use == to mean equality, which has been the source of
>zillions of bugs, because, in C, an assignment is an expression.

if(x = 5) throws a warning, so if you use -Wall it's not a problem.

>
>     In any human language, people count things by giving number 1 to
>the first and number n to the nth. In C the first has number 0 and the
>nth has number n-1. Just for the sake of pointer arithmetics.

A lot of languages have that same (mis)feature. You get used to it.
Hey, I liked Turbo Pascal 3.0 even more than C, and TP had x:=5 for
assignment and started counting at 1, and didn't have pointers. I wish
Turbo Pascal had taken over the world, but C is a good second choice.

>
>     The enumerations share one single namespace, which is the same as
>the variable names.
>
>     In C, INT_MAX+1 == -1   ( INT_MAX is defined in <limits.h>)
>
>    My PoV on C is that it is just the layer above assembler,

X-actly! And when you need just the layer above assembler, I use C.
Otherwise I use Python.

>in
>addition to be universal. And, for this it is pretty good. It is good
>for little things, but great things, like, eg, the Linux kernel or the
>GTK library are real achievements of expert programmers. Yet I'm still
>programming in C because of this: every programmer roughly understands
>it. But after 44 years of using this language, I still learned
>something 2 weks ago and something else yesterday -- it's not so often
>though (~:

Well, you don't have Dunning-Kruger syndrome. You probably learn new
things about every subject on a regular basis. At least with C, you
learned enough of the language to be productive quickly, assuming you
used -Wall.


SteveT

Steve Litt

http://444domains.com