My advice on implementing stuff in C: [LWN.net]

My advice on implementing stuff in C:

Posted Oct 16, 2010 22:46 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: My advice on implementing stuff in C: by HelloWorld
Parent article: Russell: On C Library Implementation

The real excuse is age. To be fair with C and put it in perspective you have to compare it with languages just as old. This will not solve anything but explain a lot.

to post comments

My advice on implementing stuff in C:

Posted Oct 17, 2010 22:20 UTC (Sun) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

OK, so C was invented in 1972, ML was invented in 1973. ML had a revolutionary type system (including polymorphism, type inference and algebraic data types), it had a powerful module system, and it didn't have a preprocessor because it didn't need one.
At least some of these innovations could have been copied by C without compromising the suitability for systems programming, for example the idea of strong typing and the module system; they just didn't do it.

Also, even if they hadn't known about the necessity of modules, generic algorithms and data structures etc., they could have added them later on when it became apparent; for example Ada had generic programming features in '83.