[TUHS] Is C obsolete? (was Re: [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view)

[Warner Losh]

On Mon, Jul 5, 2021, 10:37 PM Dan Stromberg <drsalists at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Mon, Jul 5, 2021 at 2:29 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Mon, Jul 5, 2021 at 4:16 PM Dan Stromberg <drsalists at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> A null-terminated array of char is a petri dish.  A proper string type
>>> is more like a disinfectant.
>>>
>> Hrrmpt.... maybe (in theory), but I can say that never seen it really
>> work in practice --  bwk in Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming
>> Language <http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html> describes much
>> of the practical realities of this sort of choice:
>>
>
> I think language designers since Pascal have learned from Pascal's mistake
> there.
>
> Supposedly even Borland's TurboPascal had better strings than vanilla
> Pascal.
>

That's true. You could do things in Turbo Pascal you couldn't do in
standard Pascals. It was close enough to C that a lot of system level code
was written in it. A bit verbose, but serviceable.

Warner

>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20210705/b42c6591/attachment.htm>