C standards and committees (was Re: strangest systems I've sent email from)

On Fri, 20 May 2016, Sean Conner wrote: There were lots of standards, but folks typically gravitated toward K&R or ANSI at the time. Though I was a pre-teen, I was a coder at the time. Those are pretty raw and primitive compared to C99 or C11, but still quite helpful, for me at least. Most of the other "standards" were pretty much a velvet glove around vendor-based "standards", IMHO. I'm pretty negative on committees, in general. However, ISO and ANSI standards have worked pretty well, so I suppose they aren't totally useless _all_ the time. Remember OSI networking protocols? They had a big nasty committee for all their efforts, and we can see how that worked out. We got the "OSI model" (which basically just apes other models already well established at the time). That's about it (oh sure, a few other things like X.500 inspired protocols but I think X.500 is garbage *shrug* YMMV). Things like TPx protocols never caught on. Some would say it was because the world is so unenlightened it couldn't recognize the genius of the commisar^H^H^H committee's collective creations. I have a somewhat different viewpoint. Hehe, what is a long long? Yes, you are totally right. Still, I assert that C is still the defacto most portable language on Earth. What other language runs on as many OS's and CPUs ? None that I can think of. Yeah, it's kind of an extension of the same issue, too many undefined grey areas. In practice, I don't run into these types of issues much. However, to be fair, I typically code on only about 3 different platforms, and they are pretty similar and "modern" (BSD, Linux, IRIX). I'm in the "please don't do squat for me that I don't ask for" camp. I know that horrifies and disgusts some folks who want GC and auto-bounds checking everywhere they can cram it in. Would SSA form aid with all kinds of fancy compiler optimizations, including some magic bounds checking? Sure. However, perhaps because I'm typical of an ignorant C coder, I would expect the cost of any such feature would be unacceptable to some. Also, there are plenty of C variants or special compilers that can do such things. Also, there are a few things that can be run with LD_PRELOAD which can help to find issues where someone has forgot to do proper bounds checking. Once people get on the "C sucks, put on some baby gates" bus, most of the actual working C coders get off at the next stop. Not judging, just observing. I've seen this over and over and over and ... I'm right there with you on this one! Hmm, well, people (me included in days gone by) tend to abuse signed scalars to simply get bigger integers. I really wish folks would embrace uintXX_t style ints ... problem solved, IMHO. It's right there for them in C99 to use. You can't always rely on the hardware, but perhaps that's your point. Hmmm, well I'm guessing most compilers on those platforms would support that (and hey, great!). That's almost always the case when folks want rubber bumpers on C. That's really emblematic of my issues with that seemly instinctual reaction some folks have to C. -Swift