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Dennis Ritchie RIPDennis Ritchie RIPPosted Oct 21, 2011 17:51 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)In reply to: Dennis Ritchie RIP by dashesy Parent article: Dennis Ritchie RIP
C syntax is so natural I think that's the first time I've heard that claim made; the typical view of C is the opposite: in exchange for density (function per source character) and power to control the object code, C was made awkward. The first time I saw "typedef int foo" I thought it was backwards and had a hard time remembering it; I still do. It isn't natural. It also isn't natural for an imperative like "a=3" to have a value, which is why it's so easy to stare at 'if (a=3) {printf("a is 3")}' and not see the error. I wonder what a person's background has to be to find C syntax natural. I believe C is a better learning language because it is honest, ... I think "honest" here must mean "low level," i.e. the source code correlates plainly with the object code. If you're trying to learn how to write programs that control the contents of memory, etc., I agree C is the better learning language. If you're trying to learn how to write programs to solve a computational problem, a high level language would be better. When I learned programming, my teachers went out of their way not to mention CPUs, memory, cycles, addresses, etc. and have me concentrate on generic computation. C would have seriously foiled their efforts.
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