[OT] - propagation of incorrect information

M

Mantorok Redgormor

Anyone come across the latest piece of crap
floating around the internet? I'm referring to:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/7/144019/8872

"Portability?!
Please. There are at least four official specifications
of C I could name from the top of my head and no compiler
has properly implemented all of them. They conflict, and
they grow and grow."

"New compilers and libraries are developed and
proprietary extensions are being developed.
GNU C isn't the same as ANSI C isn't the same as
K&R C isn't the same as Microsoft C isn't the same
as POSIX C."

This guy doesn't even understand the
fundamental differences of specifications
he has listed as "official" specifications
of C.

"The C standards don't make sense
Only one simple quote from the ANSI C standard -
nay, a single footnote - is needed to demonstrate
the immense idiocy of the whole thing. Ladies,
gentlemen, and everyone else, I present to
you...footnote 82:

All whitespace is equivalent except in
certain situations.

I'd make a cutting remark about this, but
it'd be too easy."


What is so idiotic about that?
 
C

Christopher Benson-Manica

Mantorok Redgormor said:

"Buffer overflows abound in virtually any substantial piece of C code."

I think we can all see what the character of this document is based on
such observations, and it's somewhat disappointing that kuro5hin would
publish such a screed.

I suppose that's what Kernighan gets for denigrating Pascal in the
elder days.
 
J

jacob navia

Pascal has good ideas and C too.
Please let's keep cool. We are speaking about computer
languages and not about religions.

Many of the criticisms have more than a grain of truth in
them, specially what strings and arrays bound checking
is concerned.

I am not a religious person and for me C is not a
religion. I do not feel emotionally upset when somebody
critics the obvious shortcommings of some C constructs.

I try to *fix* the problems and address the *real* issues
behind the critics of C.

I believe that a bounded array/string data type is easily
introduced in C using operator overloading.

This is even better than the Pascal solution since the
bounds checking is customizable and not fixed once
for all in the language. A default implementation
should be offered ( I am working on it), that the
user can customize, or not use, if he/she wishes.
This way we have the best of all worlds: flexibility
AND security according to the programmer's priorities.

The critics of malloc/free problems have many *real*
arguments. I proposed here the garbage collector,
that makes all those problems obsolete without
*forcing* the gc solution into all applications, even those
that do not needed like in Java.

C retains the flexibility needed to change the allocation
strategy in a per application basis, and is not TIED
to a GC like Java.

But we have to admit that offering only malloc/free
(or new/delete for that matter) is not very advanced
and should be complemented with a gc for all those
applications that benefit from it.

The article against Pascal wasn't a good idea. It was
very polemic, like the article in that web site.

When speaking about technical matters, it is better to
leave emotions outside the discussion. Machines
have no emotions, let's speak about this without
boring flame wars.

jacob
 
A

August Derleth

Christopher said:
"Buffer overflows abound in virtually any substantial piece of C code."

I think we can all see what the character of this document is based on
such observations, and it's somewhat disappointing that kuro5hin would
publish such a screed.

I guess the editors like a good troll war as much as any group of boneheads.
I suppose that's what Kernighan gets for denigrating Pascal in the
elder days.

bwk didn't denigrate Pascal. He tried to rewrite a suite of programs
(the Software Tools) in Pascal, gave up, and wrote an article detailing
the features of Pascal that made him give up. While the article is often
held up as a comparison between C and Pascal, it isn't. He was writing
about the properties of Pascal and how those properties make the
language entirely unsuitable for the kind of programming he was doing.
(He was vindicated when the Pascal language was extended in a thousand
different ways when a thousand different compiler vendors decided that
standard Pascal wasn't usable as anything other than what it had been
designed for: A teaching language strict enough to /force/ good
programming practice, at least in Wirth's view. No such language (that
is, no bondage-and-discipline language) has ever been popular in the
programmer world (see Ada).)

If you haven't read the article, it's on bwk's own page. It's also
mirrored around the world. Google does a particularaly good job of
finding it.
 
K

Keith Thompson

August Derleth said:
bwk didn't denigrate Pascal. He tried to rewrite a suite of programs
(the Software Tools) in Pascal, gave up, and wrote an article
detailing the features of Pascal that made him give up. While the
article is often held up as a comparison between C and Pascal, it
isn't. He was writing about the properties of Pascal and how those
properties make the language entirely unsuitable for the kind of
programming he was doing. (He was vindicated when the Pascal language
was extended in a thousand different ways when a thousand different
compiler vendors decided that standard Pascal wasn't usable as
anything other than what it had been designed for: A teaching language
strict enough to /force/ good programming practice, at least in
Wirth's view. No such language (that is, no bondage-and-discipline
language) has ever been popular in the programmer world (see Ada).)

As long as we're [OT], I'll mention that calling Ada a
bondage-and-discipline language is misleading. It certainly has
stricter type checking than most languages, and it encourages a more
disciplined programming style, but it also has plenty of features for
doing low-level programming (features that standard Pascal lacks). If
you want to pick apart the bits of a pointer, you can do it; you just
have to be more explicit about it.
 
E

Elliot Marks

Having read this article, I am immediately going to burn my copy
of K&R, cease all programming in C and begin learning Pascal (or
Visual Basic). I feel violated.
 
D

Dan Pop

In said:
bwk didn't denigrate Pascal. He tried to rewrite a suite of programs
(the Software Tools) in Pascal, gave up, and wrote an article detailing
the features of Pascal that made him give up. While the article is often
held up as a comparison between C and Pascal, it isn't.

Furthermore, it's worth mentioning that Kernighan tried to port The
Software Tools from FORTRAN to Pascal, not from C.

Dan
 
A

Alan Balmer

bwk didn't denigrate Pascal. He tried to rewrite a suite of programs
(the Software Tools) in Pascal, gave up, and wrote an article detailing
the features of Pascal that made him give up. While the article is often
held up as a comparison between C and Pascal, it isn't.

Gave up? I had a copy (long since disappeared) of "Software Tools in
Pascal" by Kernighan and Plauger.

The original wasn't C, of course, but Fortran. Ratfor, actually, which
I implemented from the book on the Varian Data Machines Vortex system.
 
L

Les Cargill

Dan said:
Furthermore, it's worth mentioning that Kernighan tried to port The
Software Tools from FORTRAN to Pascal, not from C.

Then what's the book "Software Tools In Pascal" doing in my bookshelf
:)?
And it was RATFOR, not Fortran, SFAIK.
 
C

CBFalconer

Dan said:
Furthermore, it's worth mentioning that Kernighan tried to port
The Software Tools from FORTRAN to Pascal, not from C.

If you spell FORTRAN as Ratfor. Looks much closer to C than to
Fortran.
 
D

Dan Pop

In said:
If you spell FORTRAN as Ratfor. Looks much closer to C than to
Fortran.

It was, nevertheless, a FORTRAN preprocessor (or front end, if you like).

Dan
 

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