Programming language failings [was Re: strangest systems I've sent email from]

[Toby Thain]

On 2016-04-30 5:20 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
> On 04/30/2016 02:07 PM, Mouse wrote:
>
>> Reading this really gives me the impression that it's time to fork
>> C. There seems to me to be a need for two different languages, which
>> I might slightly inaccurately call the one C used to be and the one
>> it has become (and is becoming).
>
>
> I vividly recall back in the 80s trying to take what we learned about
> aggressive optimization of Fortran (or FORTRAN, take your pick) and
> apply it to C.   One of the tougher nuts was the issue of pointers.
> While pointers are typed in C (including void), it's very difficult for
> an automatic optimizer to figure out exactly what's being pointed to,
> particularly when a pointer is passed as arguments or re-used.

Indeed. John Regehr writes more on this in this recent post:
http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1307

--Toby


>
> C++, to be sure, is much better in this respect.
>
> --Chuck
>