Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rochester!cornell!batcomputer!garry From: garry@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Garry Wiegand) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: bit-field pointers / arrays Message-ID: <1802@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> Date: Fri, 12-Dec-86 22:39:06 EST Article-I.D.: batcompu.1802 Posted: Fri Dec 12 22:39:06 1986 Date-Received: Mon, 15-Dec-86 21:00:10 EST Reply-To: garry%cadif-oak@cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu Organization: Cornell Engineering && Flying Moose Graphics Lines: 33 Xref: mnetor comp.lang.c:365 comp.lang.misc:44 [cross-posted to comp.lang.misc from comp.lang.c] In a recent article ballou@brahms (Kenneth R. Ballou) wrote: >... Please, please, *PLEASE* remember the philosophy of C is to provide >a small, low-level language which would nonetheless put a lot of power in >the hands of the programmer (and also the other side of the coin, a responsi- >bility to code in a halfway decent style to keep this power from making a >total mess). As a result, C can be made to run on almost anything. If you >want a fine example of language design by committee, look at ADA... I don't need a committee design, but I do need something better than C (or "baby" Pascal). I love Simula, but Univacs to run it on are getting hard to come by, and a Snobol compiler I haven't seen for years. Lisp has some virtues, but our version is a pig. C++ makes a good start on being a better language, but I'm not able to transport it trivially (because the system interface routines are written in C++) and it's not able to do much with basic things like bit arrays (because of the underlying C compiler). So: what's wrong with wishing the world were a better place, and discussing what one might want to have in such a place? And given such a discussion, isn't it reasonable to argue for your pet idea by establishing that it's at least *sometimes* rationally related to machine architecture? (After all, isn't it from PDP-11 machine code that our beloved C originally acquired "*ptr++" ? :-) garry wiegand (garry%cadif-oak@cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu) PS - Having munged the primeval Unix C compiler once upon a time to make it produce substantially better code (I got mad at it), I *know* that compiler writers are an inherently lazy lot. PPS - Wish I could get my hands on the source for the VMS C compiler - ach, some of the things it does! - oh, and the BSD one - yuck phooey!