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usrnmtoday at 8:27 AM3 repliesview on HN

The famous C dilemma: we want to be as close to the machine as possible, but don't want to change anything when the machine changes


Replies

pjmlptoday at 9:37 AM

Because contrary to urban myths, C is a normal high level language like everything else.

The Assembly like abilities have been growing as language extensions in specific compilers, not as part of ISO C.

Going back to K&R C, inline Assembly or intrisics were not even available, all of that required using the Assembler directly.

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wren6991today at 9:50 AM

Except for the basic integer types. Change those as much as possible. Hell, CHAR_BIT=12 just to keep them on their toes.

Personal pet theory: C is portable as in "you can retarget the compiler to any machine" moreso than "your code will run on any machine".

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tonyhart7today at 9:11 AM

so what they gonna do ??