From: Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com>
To: Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com>
Cc: TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: [TUHS]: C dialects (was: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2023 12:00:04 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CABH=_VTJNc_Ei=GEj94Gnp0gov9FspFDJU7ts8Az0f2a+132aA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <d8b8561c-d4a9-cf09-59fb-6622c3ee161a@gmail.com>
On 3/13/23, Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Well, it depends on what you call "C". There are many dialects,
> and I'm not sure there's any which I'd call "C".
>
> The 3 main dialects are "ISO C", "GNU C", and "K&R C". And then
> there are subdialects of them. We could say "C" is "ISO C", since,
> well, it's _the_ standard.
Note that the goal of a programming language standards committee is
very different from the goal of those who use the language. The
committee's goal is to standardize existing practice of the language
in a way that is implementable on the widest range of hardware and OS
platforms, and to provide a controlled way to add language extensions.
The goal of users is to get their job done.
The advantage of programming in strict ISO C is that the resulting
code will run just about anywhere. If you don't care about that (and
I'd wager most programmers don't) then ignore the standard.
> But then, ISO C shares the aliasing
> issues that GNU C has, so by avoiding the GNU C compiler you're
> not avoiding the issues we're talking about; moving to a compiler
> that only talks ISO C is going to keep the issues. You'll need
> a compiler that talks K&R C, or some other dialect that doesn't
> have aliasing issues.
As someone pointed out, the three things that most programmers value
are execution speed, execution speed, and execution speed. Aliasing
issues greatly hamper what a modern optimizing compiler can do and
still generate semantically correct code.
> At that point, since you already need a subdialect of C, GCC is
> one such compiler, since it provides a comprehensive set of flags
> to tune your dialect.
All the best commercial optimizing compilers do that these days. It's
a way of having your semantic cake and being able to eat it (fast
execution speed), too.
-Paul W.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-03-13 16:00 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 44+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2023-03-10 11:37 [TUHS] Re: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary Noel Chiappa
2023-03-10 11:51 ` [TUHS] Conditions, AKA exceptions. (Was: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary) Ralph Corderoy
2023-03-10 15:54 ` [TUHS] Re: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary Dan Cross
2023-03-12 7:39 ` Anthony Martin
2023-03-12 11:40 ` Dan Cross
2023-03-12 16:40 ` Paul Winalski
2023-03-13 3:25 ` John Cowan
2023-03-13 10:40 ` Alejandro Colomar (man-pages)
2023-03-13 12:19 ` Dan Cross
2023-03-13 12:43 ` [TUHS] [TUHS]: C dialects (was: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary) Alejandro Colomar
2023-03-13 12:46 ` [TUHS] " Dan Cross
2023-03-13 16:00 ` Paul Winalski [this message]
2023-03-13 19:00 ` Clem Cole
2023-03-13 19:09 ` Larry McVoy
2023-03-13 19:17 ` Steve Nickolas
2023-03-13 20:26 ` Dan Cross
2023-03-13 22:25 ` Alejandro Colomar (man-pages)
2023-03-13 19:24 ` [TUHS] Re: [TUHS]: C dialects Luther Johnson
2023-03-13 19:38 ` Luther Johnson
2023-03-14 19:48 ` John Cowan
2023-03-14 19:56 ` Joseph Holsten
2023-03-14 20:01 ` Luther Johnson
2023-03-13 20:48 ` [TUHS] Re: [TUHS]: C dialects (was: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary) Paul Winalski
2023-03-13 20:56 ` Bakul Shah
2023-03-14 1:06 ` Larry McVoy
2023-03-13 21:00 ` Paul Winalski
2023-03-13 21:07 ` Bakul Shah
2023-03-13 21:14 ` Dan Cross
2023-03-13 22:15 ` Dave Horsfall
2023-03-13 22:47 ` Dave Horsfall
2023-03-14 0:23 ` Dan Cross
2023-03-14 0:21 ` Dan Cross
2023-03-14 13:52 ` Chet Ramey
2023-03-14 1:27 ` Bakul Shah
2023-03-13 21:28 ` Paul Winalski
2023-03-14 10:04 ` [TUHS] C dialects Ralph Corderoy
2023-03-14 20:02 ` [TUHS] " John Cowan
2023-03-14 21:34 ` Thomas Paulsen
2023-03-14 0:38 ` [TUHS] Re: [TUHS]: C dialects (was: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary) John Cowan
2023-03-14 2:49 ` Theodore Ts'o
2023-03-14 3:06 ` G. Branden Robinson
2023-03-15 3:59 Noel Chiappa
2023-03-15 4:33 ` John Cowan
2023-03-16 22:50 ` Bakul Shah
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