Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site pur-ee.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!gamma!exodus!mhtsa!mh3bs!eagle!harpo!ihnp4!inuxc!pur-ee!ecn-ee!davy From: davy@ecn-ee.UUCP Newsgroups: net.unix Subject: Re: Improving C - (nf) Message-ID: <1652@pur-ee.UUCP> Date: Fri, 2-Mar-84 08:17:52 EST Article-I.D.: pur-ee.1652 Posted: Fri Mar 2 08:17:52 1984 Date-Received: Sun, 4-Mar-84 00:19:29 EST Sender: notes@pur-ee.UUCP Organization: Electrical Engineering Department , Purdue University Lines: 40 #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