Improving C - (nf)

[davy at ecn-ee.UUCP]

#R:sri-arpa:-1688400:ecn-ee:17100002:000:1770
ecn-ee!davy    Mar  2 08:05:00 1984


As far as this person's (his name appeared as "ARPA" here), ideas of 
improvements to C go, I don't consider them improvments.  It sounds like
you want to make C look like Pascal or Ada, which it isn't.

C is a language meant for PROGRAMMERS.  We KNOW what's going on (or are
supposed to) and don't need the language/compiler/run-time-environment
to hold our hands through the whole thing.  That's what debuggers are
for - they help you figure out what went wrong.

I am violently opposed to putting any kind of type checking, array bounds
checking, etc. into C.  It slows things down greatly (try running a Pascal
program with and without the run-time checks sometime), and once program
development is done, serves no useful purpose.  It would be nice, though,
if the COMPILER had an option to do array-bounds checking, like the f77
compiler does (did?).

I can also live without "proc procedurename" for the sole purpose of
making programs prettier (which is what he said it was for).  The same
thing goes for the "forward" declaration.  C doesn't NEED a forward
declaration, the loader ties all that stuff together.  The forward
keyword was put into Pascal so that it could be compiled in one pass
(everything must be defined before it's used when compiling in one pass),
not so your programs could look "pretty".  Since C is compiled in at
least two passes anyway, what's the point?

I won't respond to the rest of that stuff, I've noticed this is turning
into a "why I hate Pascal and don't want to see any of its silliness in
C" diatribe.  This is an interesting discussion, at least from the
wishlist point of view, but most of the stuff I have seen so far would
not be, in my opinion, desirable.

Donning my flame-retardant tuxedo....
--Dave Curry
pur-ee!davy