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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

If my fellow devs cringe at C, imagine their reaction to Pascal

C has all the things to hate in a programming language

  CaSe Sensitivity
  Weird pointer syntax
  Lack of a separate assignment token
  Null terminated strings
  Macros - the evil scourge of the universe

On the plus side, it's installed everywhere, and it's not indent sensitive

You mean "mere string replacement macros, instead of hygienic macros", of course : )

Except for null terminated strings these don't seem like mayor issues to me. Can you elaborate?

At this point, you're talking to someone who isn't here

> Lack of a separate assignment token

What does that mean?

Assignment is = which is too close to equality == and thus has been the source of bugs in the past, especially since C treats assignment as an expression and coerces lots of non-boolean values to true/false wherever a condition is expected (if, while, for). Most compilers warn about this at least nowadays.

Even with warnings this is just terrible. People need to stop inventing languages where "False" is true, or an empty container is false or other insane "coercions" of this kind.

True is true, and false is false, if you're wondering whether this Doodad is Wibbly, you should ask that question not rely on a convention that Wibbly Doodads are somehow "truthy" while the non-Wibbly ones are not.

> C has all the things to hate in a programming language

> CaSe Sensitivity

Wait, what, you.. you want a case-insensitive language? Like SQL?

I love SQL, but please no more case-insensitive programming languages!

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