What's C's biggest mistake?

[bearophile]

Walter Bright:
>I find the responses to be very curious, particularly the "not in the spirit of C" ones.<

There are people that think of C as something set in stone, something that has a "necessary" design. Few years of discussions in the D newsgroups teach that instead C was not born as a single atomic perfect thing, it's a collection of design choices and design compromises, the original authors have chosen only part of the possible alternatives. And some of those design choices today can be improved. (In biology it's the same thing, a mammalian body like the human one is the result of a very large number of design choices, many of them are arbitrary, and some of them are just wrong).

Today D is not a replacement of C, because of its GC and few other things (I don't think today you can use D to create 1200 bytes long binaries that run on an Arduino CPU), but maybe a reduced-D can be used for that purpose too.

Bye,
bearophile