On 8/1/2012 10:58 AM, Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 7:32 PM, Walter Bright <[email protected]> wrote:
On 8/1/2012 9:52 AM, Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 6:46 PM, Walter Bright <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 7/31/2012 10:02 AM, Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
Not so. It would make it worse (read: less portable and less
performant) than writing C.
I think this is a bit unfair - the C semantics you're talking about are
specific to one compiler. They are not standard, and such has been a
source
of non-portable trouble in the C community.
Strictly speaking, yes, you can only rely on GCC implementing the GCC
semantics. But in practice, LLVM/Clang does too (since they want to be
a GCC drop-in replacement). I'd expect other compilers in the wild to
also follow this definition since GCC is the major compiler in the
Unix world.
While you're right, I am just taking exception to your stance on C being
better for this because it has a guarantee, because it has no guarantee, and
that lack of a guarantee has indeed caused many problems. It is not
irrelevant.
C as a language, from a purely standard (and theoretical) standpoint,
no, definitely not. But C with any sane compiler out there is. And
right now, this is mostly a matter of practicality than anything else.
I can't seem to emphasize that there ARE C compilers that do not implement your
notion of volatile, and there ARE issues with C compilers behaving differently
on this, and no, they are not insane.
There's a bit of irony in that. C++ purports to support 16 bit platforms,
and many C++ proponents will point this out. But, in practice, it cannot.
The same goes for the silliness about C++ supporting any character encoding
- it cannot support Radix50 encoding. And worse for the C silliness that it
supports 32 bit 'char' sizes (yes, there are such CPUs). I don't know of
single, supposedly standard-conforming non-trivial C app that will work if
chars are 32 bits in size.
I'd actually be interested to know if such architectures are in active
use today... the only 16-bit architecture I can think of that's still
in use is MSP430, but that has char = 8 bits.
There are some DSP chips with 32 bit ints that are in active use with C, this
was discussed on comp.lang.c++.moderated a couple years back.
AFAIK, there is not a single standard conforming C++ compiler for 16 bits other
than DMC++. And I can tell you for a fact that you'll have to turn off exception
handling, RTTI, and not use STL if you want to get a useful program out of it.
(Standard conforming does not imply useful!)
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