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Comment by WastingMyTime89 | Hacker News Reader

There is no elegance there. Casting to void is not a plus. That’s just C having no proper type system.

Function pointers as an elementary form of closures, come on, what’s next? Closures are defined by capture. It’s nearly as fun as pretending C as coroutines because of setjmp.

How can a statement like C being semantically poor even be seen as controversial? For god sake, we are talking about a language which semantically doesn’t even have proper arrays.

> The elegance of the specification may be questionable, but the scope of what C tried to achieve is breathtaking. It actually is superior to most of its improvements.

Seriously? It wasn’t even a good language when it was released. Lisp and Pascal were far better. It won because of compiler availability and adequate performance on limited platforms.

HN really is a joke sometimes.

View on HN

> HN really is a joke sometimes.

A lot of what I'm seeing from your comments here is you can't handle people who have something positive to say about C.

They're not saying it's the one true way or something. Just that they like it in some respect.

And your attempts to dismiss that and call "HN" a joke for harboring someone who thinks this way look kind of childish to me.

Then you are seeing what you want to see. People are straightforwardly arguing that C is semantically rich which is indeed laughable. I have addressed the point under but clearly a lot of you don’t understand what language semantics are.

Considering I was having interesting discussion about the subtleties of the Hindley-Milner type system on this same website a decade ago, yes, I do think HN is becoming a joke. The joke is on me however because apparently I keep commenting for reasons which are not always apparent to me I must confess.

There are plenty of interesting C works out there, as well as data structures or algorithms that C can express elegantly.

Small example, linked lists. I don't think non-C linked list code tends to be as straightforward as I've seen in C.

Or the character-at-a-time style of string processing. It's kind of unique to C.

You can say there is stuff about that you don't like. That's fine. Linked lists suck with modern CPU caches anyway. C strings have lots of misadventures in terms of buffer overflows. But it's unique and interesting. Lots of elegant things have been written this way. Your unfamiliarity with it doesn't make it "a joke" to point this out.

I have my own gripes with HN. Try mentioning politics and it brings out all sorts of fascist-sympathizing crazies. But saying good to neutral things about C (while not even universally praising it) is not one of those issues.

> as straightforward as I've seen in C

To be fair, the most straightforward definition of the linked list is generic, and C completely lacks such facility.

> fascist-

Sounds familiar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33478321

> C completely lacks such facility.

Generic linked lists can be done with pointer casts. See the way the Linux kernel does it.

The list manipulation routine takes a pointer to a member, and the more specific type is opaque. The code that knows what the actual structure is can derive it from a node pointer.

A structure can even have multiple node pointers in this scheme.

Generic facilities can be opinionated. There are various ways to skin the cat, with different tradeoffs.

Template mechanisms cause code bloat and encapsulation violations: having to reveal the entire implementation to the clients so they can instantiate it for whatever type they want.

Some generic mechanisms have dumb restrictions, like you can make a "list of integer", whose elements, sadly, all have to be integers.

In C you can envision what you want genericity to look like at the detailed bit-and-byte memory level, and how you'd like to be able to work with it at the language level, pick some compromises where the two are at odds, and make it happen.

It is false to say that C completely lacks any generic facility because it has union types. Using a union we can put several types into a structure along with a type field which indicates which. We can overlay an integer, character, floating-point number, or pointer to something outside of the node.

> Sounds familiar.

I cannot decide whether it's an honor or an insult to be called a _fascist sympathizer_ for opposing the authoritarian suppression of speech.

I didn't want to address this because it's a tangent, but I understand that free speech protects expressing fascist thought. I can still disapprove of it and not want to be around a lot of it, consider high concentrations of it to be a sign of an unhealthy community, without saying it should be somehow illegal.

I am extremely familiar with C. I used to work on a static analyser for it. The issue is that there is very little to like in how C is designed from a PL point of view.

You are confusing what the language can do and what is semantic is.

C strings are just a contiguous allocation of byte and a bunch of functions which interprets it as ascii characters and stop on a specific value. That’s literally the worst representation of a string you can have.

I think it's a nice representation, allowing easy recursion.

   const char *my_strchr(const char *str, int ch)
   {
     if (*str == 0)
       return NULL;
     if (*str == ch)
       return str;
     return my_strchr(str + 1);
   }

It's a good format for storage and communication.

Name any other string data structure and I will cite you all the disadvantages compared to the C string.

- If the format contains pointers, you have to marshal it to a flat representation to communicate or store it. The C string is already marshaled.

- If the format contains size fields, their own size matters: are they 16, 32, 64. What byte order? Again, needs marshaling. You might think not if going between two processes on the same machine. But, oops, one is 32 bit the other 64 ...

I shudder to think of what FFIs would look like, if C strings were something else. It's the one easy thing in foreign interfacing.

C programs themselves sometimes come up with alternative string representations, for good reasons; but those representations don't interoperate with anything outside of those programs, or groups of closely related programs.

C null terminated strings are not magic. Protocols between the sender and receiver have to be defined. You face exactly the same problem regarding byte order, size consideration and marshalling with C strings.

You are basically arguing that C strings are a good default because they are the default. If they were something else, well, we would have saner FFI in a lot of place.

C strings are a terrible default. They are fundamentally unsafe. Mishandle the null char for any reason and you now face a serious security issue.

> You face exactly the same problem regarding byte order, size consideration and marshalling with C strings.

Not char/byte C strings. You might be thinking of wchar_t strings.

> Mishandle the null char for any reason and you now face a serious security issue.

With what string data structure can applications peak into and mishandle an implementation detail and not risk creating a security problem?

Same you have a structure with the length and a pointer. Mishandle the length field or pointer and you have a problem.

It certainly is a problem and it's common for C applications to take on responsibilities for manipulating the internals of the string structure.

> Not char/byte C strings. You might be thinking of wchar_t strings.

No I’m talking about the classic byte arrays C pretends are strings. If the receiver you are talking to is not expecting a chain of bytes where each byte is a character and one special value means the chain is over, well, you will have to transform what you are sending to what your receiver is expecting.

If somebody's expecting something other than a C string then we unsurprisingly have gratuitous complications. If everyone agrees on the C string though, it just interoperates as-is. Code compiled for some 16-bit microcontroller can just shove the C string into its transmit buffer, and on the other end, code compiled for 64 bit big-endian Power PC receiver just uses it as-is.

C is the biggest mistake in the software industry since the beginning of software. The people that worship C only do so because they haven't seen the better paths the software industry could have chosen.

E.g. Donald Knuth hadn't seen better paths.

"I think C has a lot of features that are very important. The way C handles pointers, for example, was a brilliant innovation; it solved a lot of problems that we had before in data structuring and made the programs look good afterwards. C isn't the perfect language, no language is, but I think it has a lot of virtues, and you can avoid the parts you don't like. I do like C as a language, especially because it blends in with the operating system (if you're using UNIX, for example).

All through my life, I've always used the programming language that blended best with the debugging system and operating system that I'm using. If I had a better debugger for language X, and if X went well with the operating system, I would be using that."

Dec 7, 1993, Computer Literacy Bookshops Interview.

This is ridiculous hyperbole.

Nobody "worships" C and people who have positive experiences with C often have exposure to higher level languages.

You can find strengths or upsides in C and still acknowledge faults, and still acknowledge merits elsewhere.

This routine only works with ASCII, yea?

It will also find ASCII characters in UTF-8. That's a common situation because delimiting characters are often in the ASCII range.

We can make a more complicated example that nevertheless uses recursion and essentially the same way, which looks for a UTF-8 character. We can examine and decode a prefix of the string as a UTF-8. If there are bad bytes or the character doesn't match then we recurse.

We can also write a wide character (wchar_t) version of the function which looks the same. That will handle all of Unicode on sane platforms, and the basic multilingual plane (BMP) on Windows.

If that static analyzer was itself written in C, you have one program's worth of C experience, which is very little.

Much of what you say is true. But I came to C from Pascal. Pascal circa 1982 was unusable without all the numerous extensions each vendor tacked on. C worked out of the box. I could get things done in C without constantly fighting the Pascal and Fortran compilers of the day. This was true despite the terrible C compilers of that time.

I remeber that Small-C and RatC were hardly usefull without tons of inline Assembly.

As proven by books like "A book on C" from 1984 (Robert Edward Berry and B. A. E. Meekings).

Pascal wasn't ready for real-world use because it came from an academic setting and was initially designed to run P-code in a VM. It's successor, Modula-2, fixed all of Pascal's issues and added a lot of great functionality.

You really don't understand, but that's okay. C is a wonderful language, and that's the end of it really. You just try to think C as a language that SHOULD HAVE all the stupid bells and whistles you find convenient. Many of us more advanced coders have found that those stupid bells and whistles are, in fact, inconvenient. Casting to void is a powerful technique and the limits are literally endless. C is semantically rich, way beyond your dull imagination.

The argument is not about what can and can’t be done in C. C is Turing complete and low level. You can do anything in C. The debate is not even about if it’s good idea (I don’t think it is but that’s separate).

The question is about C semantics. Given the reply I get it’s pretty obvious that some here don’t understand what language semantics are. It’s about the amount of concepts you can express in the language. Haskell - a language I personally despise - is semantically very rich. So is modern C++ for what it’s worth. C simply isn’t.

It’s even deceiving sometimes because it has the apparence of having some semantic elements (arrays for exemple) which are not there in reality and are really only syntactic sugar on top of other semantic constructions(pointers).

You’re whitewashing history if you think Pascal was superior to C. There was no conspiracy among compiler developers as you imply.

Also you complain about semantic richness of C, but then only point to semantically rich languages you despise. A curious reader would wonder: why care about semantically rich languages then? An observant reader would wonder: so aren’t there times where semantic richness is not useful?

What conspiracies are you talking about? C won because its compiler was widely available for free. That’s pretty much a fact. Pascal was indeed a superior language but limited by the proliferation of extensions, paid compilers and its compiler performance.

I’m not even complaining about the semantic richness of C. I’m just stating the fact that it doesn’t really have semantic richness. Then again don’t get me wrong. I do think C is a terrible language and I say that having worked on a C static analyser. It’s full of avoidable undefined behaviours and silly sharp edges.

Thankfully, nice languages with rich semantic exist. I was just pointing some I don’t like to separate the issue of semantic richness from likability. I enjoyed working in Ada a lot. Ocaml is awesome. I have never used Rust but from what I have seen that seems nice.

Semantic richness is useful because it helps programmers express what they want to do in way which are clearer and therefore more likely to be correct.

Pascal, at least the original specification, does have a few flaws. It was intended to run as P-code in a VM so you wouldn't expect it to be as good as running directly on the hardware.

The successor to Pascal, which fixed it's problems, was Modula-2, which is vastly superior to C. Unfortunately by the time it came out and started becoming available, it was too late for it to compete fairly with C. Ada is comparable to Modula-2, especially before Ada added OOP, but Ada was too late to compete with C as well.

It's taken 30 years but finally we are starting to see safe languages, eg. Rust, compete with C and C++. I don't know whether Rust will be the language that overtakes C and C++, but if not, I believe a successor to it will and C and C++ will become like COBOL, that no ones uses to write any new code.

Pascal was and is continually evolving. A strong argument can be made that Object Pascal was the "successor" of Pascal, and that happened in 1985/86. After Apple and Wirth developed Object Pascal, Borland added the OOP extensions to their version soon afterwards. Turbo Pascal had quite a long run, and some are still using it. The Delphi dialect of Object Pascal came out in the early 1990s and Free Pascal came out in the late 1990s.

Many of the so-called issues with Pascal were resolved way back in the mid to late 1980s. In regards to Pascal's competition with C, this arguably evolves around AT&T and Unix. It's AT&T and their huge government, industry, and business influence that pushed C over the top.

Modula-2 has many new features that make it better than Pascal. It is not merely a Pascal with some issues fixed.

One small thing I like about Modula-2 is an improvement in the syntax where BEGIN is not required after conditionals and loops.

The first thing you need to learn about semantics is that it's a singular: "what semantics is", not "what semantics are".

The nice thing about C is that if you're opinionated about what you want your ideal language to look like, you can use C in that pursuit. You can write your run-time in C and parts of the implementation. C is good for interfacing with operating system platforms.

You can fully bootstrap yourself off C entirely, or stick with C for the run-time and perhaps other parts. If your language isn't very good at expressing low-level manipulations, you can keep C in there as an option for writing those kinds of modules.

Some languages have used C as a target language for compilation.

C can be an enabler in the pursuit of other languages.

C is a garbage language. It has a lot of undefined behaviour. It isn't safe. It isn't even strongly typed. It's only marginally better than a macro assembler. C programmers consider that a virtue but programmers who want to write safe, robust code, know C is garbage.

"One man's garbage is another man's treasure."

Those people are called hoarders.

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