>> 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.
