[jschwartzi]

What is your definition of "portable"? Are you using that term to mean "code I write for one platform can run without modification on other platforms" or "the language I use for one platform works on other platforms"?

I think when you get down to the level of C you're looking at the latter much more than the former. C is really more of a platform-agnostic assembler. It's not a design smell to have conventions within the group of language users that are de-facto language rules. For reference, see all the PEP rules about whitespace around different language constructs. These are not enforced.

The whole point of writing a C program is to be close to the addressable resources of the platform, so you'd probably want to expose those low-level constructs unless there's a compelling reason not to. Eliminating an argument from a function by hiding it in a data structure is not that compelling to me since I can just do that on my own. And then I can also pass other information such as the platforms mutex or semaphore representation in the same data structure if I need to.

By the way, that convenient length+pointer array requires new language constructs for looping that are effectively syntactic sugar around the for loop. Or you need a way to access the members of the structure. And syntactic sugar constrains how you can use the construct. So I'm not sure that it adds anything to the language that isn't already there. And the fact that length+pointer is such a common construct indicates that most people don't have any issues with it at all once they learn the language.

[vkou]

> And the fact that length+pointer is such a common construct indicates that most people don't have any issues with it at all once they learn the language.

Given the prevalence of buffer overflow bugs in computing, I'd say that there are quite a few programmers who have quite a few issues with this concept in practice.

The rest of your arguments are quite sound, but I have to disagree with that one.

[apotheon]

> What is your definition of "portable"?

In that particular statement at the beginning of my preceding comment, I meant portability across compiler implementations.

> Eliminating an argument from a function by hiding it in a data structure is not that compelling to me since I can just do that on my own.

I meant to refer more to the idea that, when doing it on your own in a particular way, the compiler could support applying a (set of) constraint(s) to prevent overflows (as an example), such that any constraint couldn't be bypassed except by very obviously intentional means. Just automating the creation of the very, very simply constructed "plus a numeric field" struct seems obviously not worth including as a new feature of the standardized language.

> the fact that length+pointer is such a common construct indicates that most people don't have any issues with it

I think you're measuring the wrong kind of problem. Even C programmers with a high level of expertise may have problems with this approach, because it's when programmer error causes a problem not caught by code review or the compiler via buffer overflows (for instance) that we see a need for more.