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by jimbokun
3688 days ago
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Maybe this made Zed feel better, but communicates almost nothing to any outside reader. Not a single actual quote from any of his detractors, for the reader to judge for him or her self if their criticisms have any validity. The categorical declaration of "I cannot help old programmers," without providing the evidence he has for this claim. Lots of name calling, though. No link to the original content, to determine for ourselves whether or not it was fair to K&R's work. I suppose Zed just meant this to be personally cathartic, and didn't realize he posted it on a public web site where other people can read it? |
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Yes. I can't figure out exactly what he's ranting about. He writes "I will make it clear that my version of C is limited and odd on purpose because it makes my code safe." Does this mean he defined a safer subset of C? (There are lots of those. I've taken a crack at that myself [1], but it's politically hopeless. Rust is the way forward.)
Why would anyone want to write K&R C today? It's awful. It didn't even check function parameter types. Struct fields were just offsets; you could use one on a pointer of the wrong type and the compiler wouldn't complain. (Considering that Pascal predated C by some years, and had a sane type system, this was kind of lame. But they were trying to compile in 64K of 16 bit words in one pass. That was an adequate excuse in the 1970s.) The first ANSI C at least had a sane type system.
[1] http://www.animats.com/papers/languages/safearraysforc43.pdf