What's C's biggest mistake?

merlin merlin at esilo.com
Wed Dec 30 06:32:00 PST 2009


Walter Bright wrote:
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ai9uc/whats_cs_biggest_mistake/ 

That's a big one.  I don't know if it's the biggest, there are so many 
to choose from:

*) lack of standard bool type (later fixed)
*) lack of guaranteed length integer types (later fixed)
*) lack of string type and broken standard library string handling (not 
fixed)
*) obviously wrong type declaration (int v[] not int[] v)
*) grammar not context free (so close, yet so far...)
*) lousy exception handling implementation

IMO, had a few things gone differently with C, Java, C++, and other 
attempts to simplify/fix it would not have happened.  D is the only 
language that really got it right IMO.

merlin



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