[TUHS] Minimum Array Sizes in 16 bit C (was Maximum)

[Luther Johnson]

C, Lisp, and probably many other languages have gone through a similar
historical arc - first they are designed to solve problems, and be a
useful and powerful means of expression - then they become official,
standardized, and legalistic - then they become commercially
competitive, and leverage the legalisms, benchmarks, and other
collateral that has accrued - at this point, generations later, the
language is evolving with no appreciation or understanding of the
aesthetic and practical principles of the original language effort.

My old-man-grousing for today.

On 11/18/2024 05:00 AM, Anton Shepelev wrote:
> Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Programmer ability is certainly an issue, but I would suggest that
>> another goes back to what Rob was alluding to: compiler writers have
>> taken too much advantage of UB, making it difficult to write
>> well-formed programs that last.
> Following the letter, rather than the spirit, of the standard?
>
>> The `realloc` function I mentioned earlier is a good case in point;
>> the first ANSI C standard says this: "If ptr is a null pointer, the
>> realloc function behaves like the malloc function for the specified
>> size. ... If size is zero and ptr is not a null pointer, the object it
>> points to is freed." While the description of `malloc` doesn't say
>> thing about what happens when `size` is 0, perhaps making `realloc(0,
>> NULL)` nominally UB (??), the behavior of `realloc(0, ptr)` is clearly
>> well defined when `ptr` is not nil, and it's entirely possible that
>> programs were written with that well-defined behavior as an
>> assumption. (Worth mentioning is that this language was changed in
>> C99, and implementations started differing from there.)
>>
>> But now, C23 has made `realloc(0, ptr)` UB, regardless of the value of
>> `ptr`
> Something similar happened with so-called strict aliasing, when the
> compilers started assuming pointers to incompatible types as always
> pointer to different non-overlapping locations:
>
> See, e.g.: <https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/strict-aliasing-rule-in-c-with-examples/>
> Linus ranterd about it: <https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/6/5/769>
>
>> My sense is that tossing in bad programmers is just throwing gasoline
>> onto a dumpster fire. Particularly when they look to charlatans like
>> Robert Martin or Allen Holub as sources of education and inspiration
>> instead of seeking out proper sources of education.
> I am a bad one as well, to have liked some things in Martin's books
> /Clean Code/ and /Clean Architecture/ .  True, heis no Wirth, nor
> Dijxtra, nor Knuth, but why a charlatan?
>
>