Re: Fun with C

[Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid>]

J-P. Rosen wrote:
> Le 22/04/2011 08:16, Elias Salom�o Helou Neto a �crit :
>> Yep. That's a major problem. No matter how much I try to teach people
>> to think before coding, they won't do so. But I don't think that Ada
>> makes it any better, does it?
> No, 

I disagree with J-P. Even if Ada programmers may be as likely as C 
programmers to start typing ("coding") before thinking, I believe that 
Ada programmers are much more likely to start by typing things that are 
on the design level, such as package declarations, type declarations, 
and subprogram declarations, because these things are so much better 
supported and therefore easier to use in Ada than in C. Thus, the 
initial Ada "coding" is really "designing".

A programmer can of course create a C program in the same way, with type 
declarations in header files etc., but the traditional C culture does 
not guide programmers in this direction.

> it just makes it more likely that inconsistent design will produce 
> code that does not compile.

I entirely agree with that.

>> Of course this is a rather good justification for Ada to be more
>> widely adopted. As I've said elsewhere on this thread, Ada's premises
>> are far more realistic than C's ones. But it does not make C a lame
>> language.
>>
> C is not a lame language, because it fulfills its intended purpose: a 
> portable assembly language.

In my view C is not even good as a portable assembly language. The least 
I would expect from an assembly language is full control over the 
machine, at least over the abstracted machine that the language shows 
you. But in C, very basic things such as the behaviour on overflow of 
signed integer operations is undefined. Only recently has the language 
even defined integer types with known sizes.

I think C was originally an attempt to get some of the benefits of a 
high-level language (portability being one of them) with the same 
performance and code size as assembly language. In the circumstances of 
the first C implementations, the language designers and compiler 
developers were satisfied with a hybrid language that has some 
high-level flavour but is mired in a swamp of low-level, yet undefined 
and unportable semantics. Perhaps this was the best that they could do, 
within their resources, but unfortunately C became popular and 
standardized in this inadequate form.

I think of C as a Model-T Ford. It worked, and still works, but good 
grief... to claim that it is the ideal car boggles my mind.

-- 
Niklas Holsti
Tidorum Ltd
niklas holsti tidorum fi
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