The State of C (1988) | Hacker News Reader

The State of C (1988)

drdobbs.com

> To complete the list of things that C might provide but doesn't: It has no storage management, like Pascal's new function

Pascal is essentially just the abandoned prototype for more grown-up designs like Modula-2.

The Modula-2 language an allocation mechanism more similar to malloc and free. And, actually, early versions of that were broken: there was a way to ask how much memory remains before trying the memory allocation request, with no way to know whether it succeeded.

Guess what? This was fixed in the ISO standard.

See here, the ISO function reference on modula2.org:

http://modula2.org/reference/isomodules/isomodule.php?file=S...

  PROCEDURE ALLOCATE (VAR addr: SYSTEM.ADDRESS; amount: CARDINAL);
    (* Allocates storage for a variable of size amount and assigns the address of this
       variable to addr. If there is insufficient unallocated storage to do this, the
       value NIL is assigned to addr.
    *)

So ISO Modula 2 has an allocator that pretty much exactly like malloc and free. (It's worse: DEALLOCATE needs to know the size!)

If Pascal's way was better, it would have survived into Modula-2.

Also, Modula-2 has I/O functions that you try first, and then check the result. Streams are called "channels":

  PROCEDURE ReadRestLine (cid: IOChan.ChanId; VAR s: ARRAY OF CHAR);
    (* Removes any remaining characters from the input stream cid before the next line mark,
       copying to s as many as can be accommodated as a string value. The read result is set
       to the value allRight, outOfRange, endOfLine, or endOfInput.
    *)

More like C, again. None of this business of knowing whether we are at end-of-file or end-of-line without trying any input.

> C also provides a goto statement, but it's infrequently used.

Whoever wrote this was a bit naïve.

No, they were quite correct in context. Note that this was written in the 1980s, and the context was comparisons to contemporary versions of Fortran and BASIC, by which standard "goto" was -- and is -- infrequently used in C.

> C is a general-purpose programming language that was originally designed and implemented around 1972 by Dennis Rithie at Bell Labs. Its early growth was closely associated ith the Unix system where it was developed, since both the tern and most of the programs that run on it are written in C.

Three typos in the first two sentences. Was this transcribed? I'm a little suspicious now of the attributed authorship, since I somehow doubt that Dennis Ritchie would misspell his own name.

EDIT: There's this snippet as well at the end: > In the meantime, C wears well as your experience with it grows. With 15 years of C experience, we still feel that way.

So I'd put it the article's original publication date sometime between 1988 and 1990?

I doubt very much that the bulk of the text was written in (or near) 2005. Thus it tells very little of the state of C in 2005, but might otherwise prove to be mildly interesting read on the 80s.

Indeed, I found the quote "ANSI C is expected to be approved late in 1988."

Good catch. At the end:

Edit: something's not right there. That's way too early. According to https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/bwkbib.html, it's 1988 and from BYTE.

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