The main thing
C has that most other languages don't is *unsafe*
data typing - the ability to subvert the type system at the drop of
a cast, and the programming tradition to do this a lot.
{Sighs.} You really seem
to have it out for C.
I didn't write that the double-quoted text, but it seems to me that you
are reading a pejorative attitude into it that I'm not sure belongs
there. That _is_ one of the bigger things C has - and, like many
language features, it's a double-edged sword. It makes possible a lot
of things, many useful, many dangerous, and in some cases, even, both
at once.
It is possible to come fairly close to type-safe C. But even in the
most type-safe of my programs, I sometimes find a need to break the
type safety for one reason or another - and C lets me do that without
extreme gyrations. (I remember the FORTRAN I used in my larval phase,
back in the 1980s under VMS; IIRC doing the equivalent of following a
pointer was rather difficult without the use of a helper routine and a
language extension.)
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