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Why use C?Why use C?Posted Jun 29, 2012 21:31 UTC (Fri) by tjc (subscriber, #137)In reply to: Why use C? by niner Parent article: Why learn C? (O'Reilly Radar)
Reducing this to a single sentence, C is currently the best available software abstraction of the Von Neumann architecture.
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Why use C? Posted Jun 29, 2012 22:13 UTC (Fri) by daniel (subscriber, #3181) [Link]
"Reducing this to a single sentence, C is currently the best available software abstraction of the Von Neumann architecture."
According to who?
Why use C? Posted Jun 30, 2012 18:03 UTC (Sat) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]
I thought that would be obvious, since I posted it. ;)
Why use C? Posted Jul 9, 2012 5:21 UTC (Mon) by daniel (subscriber, #3181) [Link]
Well then I must compliment you on your skillful trolling style.
Why use C? Posted Jul 1, 2012 6:06 UTC (Sun) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link]
FWIW, C is carefully defined to work just as well on Harvard architectures. That's why there's no conversions allowed between object and function pointers.
Also, you can't compare pointers which aren't derived from the same object. Which means the address space isn't necessarily flat, either.
Why use C? Posted Jul 1, 2012 22:44 UTC (Sun) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]
Yes, I believe you are right. I was actually thinking of the broader definition of Von Neumann vs. Turing Machine rather than the more specific case of Von Neumann vs. Harvard. In other words, a system with a CPU, registers, and random-access memory.
Somewhere in this video he claims that there are only two foundational languages, C and Lisp, and I think that nails it pretty well. I'm sure there are people who would take umbrage with that claim.
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