On Thursday, 31 January 2013 at 00:50:39 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 01:36:06AM +0100, Zach the Mystic wrote:
On Tuesday, 29 January 2013 at 19:21:34 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
>Even worse is all the millions of man-hours wasted in (usually
>incorrectly) trying to make C code portable to theoretical C
>compilers that have ints larger than 32 bits, etc., trying to
>ensure that modern C code will work on a 16 bit C compiler,
>and on
>and on.
>
>By defining these problems out of existence, D achieves a
>major
>simplification in terms of programming bugs that are far more
>theoretical than real.
You know, defining a problem out of existence is a damn good
way of
solving the problem!
The point was that these problems are by and large
non-problems. Even
where these issues are applicable, people are already not using
stock C
compilers anyway, so it's pointless to address them in the
general case.
If you're somewhat familiar with the details of the C standard,
you'll
realize that a laughably large percentage of C code currently
in use is
actually invalid C (either due to undefined behaviour, or
incorrect
reliance on sizeof(char)==1, or a whole bunch of other obscure
rules
that most C programmers aren't even aware of). Even some of the
most
portable C code out there is actually non-portable according to
the
standard.
T
Well, I suppose only a tiny fraction of all programming problems
fall into the category where it becomes possible to define them
out of existence. But it's definitely the way to go, I'd say, if
it's one of the available choices. At the same time, it probably
takes good sense to actually recognize both that it is a choice
and to go ahead and make that choice. I meant the comment as both
a joke and a compliment with regards to that good sense.
