| This turns out to be contentious. There are two histories of the C language and which one you get told is true depends on who you ask. 1/ a way to emit specific assembly with a compiler dealing with register allocation and instruction selection 2/ an abstract machine specification that permits optimisations and also happens to lower well defined code to some architectures My working theory is that the language standardisation effort invented the latter. So when people say C was always like this, they mean since ansi c89, and there was no language before that. And when people say C used to be typed/convenient assembly language, they're referring to the language that was called C that existed in reality prior to that standards document. The WG14 mailing list was insistent (in correspondence to me) that C was always like this, some of whom were presumably around at the time. A partial counterargument is the semi-infamous message from Dennis Richie copied in various places, e.g. https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/dmr-on-noalias.html An out of context quote from that email to encourage people to read said context and ideally reply here with more information on this historical assessment "The fundamental problem is that it is not possible to write real programs using the X3J11 definition of C. The committee has created an unreal language that no one can or will actually use." Regards |
But the committee has always had a lot of C compiler developers in it. The people who wrote the C89 standard were the same people who developed many of the C compilers in use before C89. The people who created the reality prior to C89 created the reality after C89. Any perception of "portable assembly" probably stemmed simply from the fact that optimizers were much less sophisticated.