What's C's biggest mistake?

[Marco]

bearophile Wrote:

> 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. 

  For the most part the C design is complete at this point in its language lifecycle with only minor tweaks allowed in the core language that don't break existing ISO C90 standard code. C99 introduced VLAs which was a mistake bolting on a new feature.

Of course - cleanup of the standard libraries should continue.