From: dave@horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall)
Subject: [TUHS] Comments on "C"
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 04:21:46 +1000 (EST) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.11.1608290416020.74486@aneurin.horsfall.org> (raw)
Seen on another list... And I got quoted by Steve Bellovin :-)
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kent Borg
To: cryptography at metzdowd.com
Subject: Re: [Cryptography]
"NSA-linked Cisco exploit poses bigger threat than previously thought"
On 08/25/2016 06:06 PM, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> I first heard more or less that line from Doug McIlroy himself; he
> called C the best assembler language he'd ever used.
Ancient fun-fact: Years ago there was an article in Byte magazine
describing how a useful subset of C could be directly assembled into 68000
code. Not compiled, assembled.
C is a stunning assembly language. When those wild-eyed nerds at AT&T
decided to write Unix not in assembly but in C (where was management!?),
it was radical. But C was up to (down to?) the task, it was pioneering
then and is still doing useful things decades later: From the fastest
supercomputers to some pretty slim microcontrollers (plus a hell of a lot
of Android devices) multitudes of computers run a Linux kernel compiled
from the *same* C source code, with almost no assembly. Big-endian,
little-endian: no matter. Different word lengths: no matter.
That is one impressive cross-platform assembly language!
Unfortunately, C is also a dangerous language that mortal programmers
cannot reliably wield.
-kb, the Kent who knows he is pressing his luck on a moderated
cryptography mailing list, but C deserves a lot of respect, as it also
deserves to be efficiently sent into a dignified retirement.
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next reply other threads:[~2016-08-28 18:21 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 32+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2016-08-28 18:21 Dave Horsfall [this message]
2016-08-29 0:37 ` Marc Rochkind
2016-08-29 0:42 ` Larry McVoy
2016-08-29 1:54 ` Steve Nickolas
2016-09-08 1:19 ` Blake McBride
2016-08-29 3:16 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2016-08-31 10:02 ` Tim Bradshaw
2016-08-31 12:59 ` John Cowan
2016-08-31 13:32 ` Ron Natalie
2016-08-31 14:37 ` John Cowan
2016-08-31 13:57 ` Brantley Coile
2016-09-01 9:17 Norman Wilson
2016-09-01 15:11 ` Clem Cole
2016-09-01 21:47 ` Tim Bradshaw
2016-09-02 0:11 ` Mary Ann Horton
2016-09-02 7:10 ` Steve Simon
2016-09-02 10:02 ` Steve Nickolas
2016-09-02 14:13 ` Random832
2016-09-02 21:23 ` Dave Horsfall
2016-09-04 17:03 ` scj
2016-09-05 13:07 ` Ron Natalie
2016-09-04 22:24 ` Nemo
2016-09-08 12:35 Doug McIlroy
2016-09-09 17:07 ` scj
2016-09-08 13:30 Noel Chiappa
2016-09-08 14:22 ` Tony Finch
2016-09-08 19:20 ` Ron Natalie
2016-09-08 22:06 ` Dave Horsfall
2016-09-09 3:02 ` Ronald Natalie
2016-09-09 6:06 ` Diomidis Spinellis
2016-09-09 21:15 ` Mary Ann Horton
2016-09-09 2:43 Doug McIlroy
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