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Comment by ahoka | Hacker News Reader

C could have been a much nicer language if it wasn’t captured by people who insisted that not even two’s complement can be in the standard.

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I guess those people were parts of the embedded software industry before 2000 (maybe today, I don't know). It's a very good thing that C, the lingua franca of modern computing, actually runs on everything and not just on the stuff we use to browse the internet.

There was a lot more innovation in computer architectures in the 80s and 90s. C89 is designed to permit implementation on unconventional hardware like the Lisp machine. C's flexible targeting is its greatest asset.

Yep right when everyone

   1. Standardized on two's complement.
   2. Little endian.
   3. We went from word based memory systems to line based ones.
   4. RISC lost out to super scalar designs.

Cs ability to run on "unconventional" (though there is little unconventional about the Lisp Machine, it is a just a stack based machine) long predates C89 (specifically).

ZETA-C, a C compiler specific to the Lisp Machine, was already fully fledged by 1987 or there about. Don't have notes on when ZETA-C came to be, but it was much earlier than that, e.g., some of the headers are dated 1984.

One cool thing about ZETA-C was you could embed Lisp code in between C code:

    extern FILE *stdin, *stdout, *stderr;
    #lisp
      ;; We don't want this file to "own" these
     (zeta-c:zclib>initialize-file-pointer |stdin| 0)
     (zeta-c:zclib>initialize-file-pointer |stdout| 1)
     (zeta-c:zclib>initialize-file-pointer |stderr| 2)
    #endlisp

I don't think it was unreasonable at the time ANSI did the standardization originally. As with Common Lisp, they had to consider the numerous already-existing implementations and code written with them in mind.

Two's complement being in the standard is overrated and for the most part doesn't really make much about the language better.

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