From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,9ca52c8981c1b86a X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!j13g2000yqj.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Ludovic Brenta Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: One other possible reason for the C predominance Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2011 08:12:23 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: 153.98.68.197 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1300806743 15516 127.0.0.1 (22 Mar 2011 15:12:23 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2011 15:12:23 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: j13g2000yqj.googlegroups.com; posting-host=153.98.68.197; posting-account=pcLQNgkAAAD9TrXkhkIgiY6-MDtJjIlC User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009012111 Red Hat/3.0.6-1.el5 Firefox/3.0.6,gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:18369 Date: 2011-03-22T08:12:23-07:00 List-Id: Yannick Duch=EAne wrote: > So C, as language, became something to which architectures adapted, =A0 > instead of the opposite. Not sure about that. I think the hardware architectures became simpler and more orthogonal simply because the cost of memory was dropping, such that compactness of executable code became less and less of an issue. The trend continued with RISC. > 1) This means C was finally never proved to be good at expressing these > layers In fact, C is bad because it assumes a uniform memory architecture and a flat address space. These assumptions were OK for a few decades but nowadays, GPUs with dedicated memory are a common case of non-uniform memory architectures; the Cell processor and the rise of massively parallel supercomputers is another. Ada has storage pools to represent this kind of thing. > 2) This means C was finally a precursor of the virtual-machines + abstrac= t > virtual-machines-dedicated-languages fever we actually have. No, C was not a precursor; Lisp ("discovered" in 1954) was. Lisp even produced a hardware architecture optimized for running Lisp bytecode, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine. I don't think C was a precursor at anything, really. It was, and still is, a hack. -- Ludovic Brenta.