APL\360

[Guy Sotomayor]

On 1/30/21 9:52 AM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> On 1/29/21 10:03 PM, Guy Sotomayor via cctalk wrote:
>
>> And unfortunately some industries it is prohibited.  Those industries
>> *require* conformance to MISRA, CERT-C, ISO-26262 and others.  There is
>> *no* choice since the code has to be audited and compliance is *not*
>> optional.
> Just an illustration of what happens when you take a "portable
> alternative to assembly" and put lipstick on it.   I've been programming
> C since System III Unix and I still consider it to be a portable (sort
> of) alternative to assembly.
>
> One of the problems with C, in my view, is a lack of direction.  There
> are plenty of languages that aim for specific ends.  (e.g. COBOL =
> business/commercial, FORTRAN = scientific, Java = web applications,
> etc.).   But whence C or C++?
>
> In my dotage, I do a fair amount of MCU programming nowadays, and C is
> the lingua franca in that world; the only real alternative is assembly,
> so that makes some sense.  Python, Ada, etc. never really managed to
> make much headway there.  C is far more prevalent than C++ in that
> world, FWIW.
>
> Does standard C have vector extensions yet?  I was an alternate rep for
> my firm for F90 (was supposed to be F88) for vector extensions; it's
> just a matter of curiosity.

I've been writing in C since 1977 (Unix V6 days and went through the =+ 
to += conversion in V7).  I've seen *a lot* of changes in C over that time.

Most of what I do is low level stuff (OS, RTOS, etc) and actually 
*rarely* even use the C library (most of what I build is built with 
-nostdlibs).

I typically build using -c99 but I'm looking at C11 because of atomics 
that were introduced then but I have to see what's native compiler 
generated versus what it relies on for the atomic operations.  I haven't 
yet seen what's in C17 yet.  I've also been known to write a special 
hand crafted function so that an entire portion of the C library doesn't 
get pulled in.  Not only did it save a bunch of space but it was *much* 
faster too.


TTFN - Guy