[TUHS] PDP-11 legacy, C, and modern architectures

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 05:54:32PM -0400, Ronald Natalie wrote:
> > 
> > So I agree, had the same initial reaction.  But I read the paper a 
> > second time and the point about Fortran, all these years later, still
> > being a thing resonated.  The hardware guys stand on their heads to
> > give us coherent caches.  
> 
> Fortran is a higher level language.    It gives he compiler more flexibility in deciding what the programmer intended and how to automatically optimize for the platform.
> C is often a ???You asked for it, you got it??? type paradigm/

I think you are more or less agreeing with the author.  (I also think, as
Unix die hards, we all bridle a little when anyone dares to say anything
negative about C.  We should resist that if it gets in the way of making
things better.)

The author at least has me thinking about how you could make a C like 
language that didn't ask as much from the hardware.
-- 
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Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm