From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <4c83173a84a81a849e4be0cd323cc81f@proxima.alt.za>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] speaking of kenc
Date: Sun,  6 May 2007 07:32:45 +0200
From: lucio@proxima.alt.za
In-Reply-To: <463D6328.3050909@conducive.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 5b47f33e-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

>> i found it easy enough to program in assembly, but i don't think you'd
>> get very far with c.  i just don't think you could fit things into memory.
> 
> Well 'C compiler hosted on a larger machine, and with that one as a binary
> target' will no doubt come back from someone. And that isn't wrong.

This makes as much sense now as it did in the 1950s.  The assembler
was then just a mnemonic translator and that is just about what Erik
must have been doing.  With greater familiarity, you can probably code
the damn thing in binary.

But is that where we're all going?

The point Brucee made and I tried to corroborate is that a good C
compiler, not GCC, nor ANSI's C99 with their need to please more the
designers than the audience, could provide most, if not all the
optimisations one actually needs without making the language a burden
to learn.  And without slipping into low-level programming.

In my long experience as a programming language hobbyist, I have yet
to encounter a programming language more suited to this particular
environment.  It bothers me that the trend is away from here, towards
extending the C language, where other languages may be better suited
to the newer, larger, more complex applications.

In other words, C covers a wide enough scope, from near as damn the
bare-bone machine to sizeable applications.  Once you exceed a certain
level, it makes more sense to look elsewhere.  I wonder if the GCC
developers have evne considered redeveloping GCC in a language other
than C?

++L

PS: Doug Gwyn may well claim that the ANSI committee is trying to
standardise best common practices, but I have a feeling that the
committee is unqualified to do this because they represent the wrong
interests, as I said above, not the users, but the feature designers.