What's C's biggest mistake?

[renoX]

On Wednesday, 30 December 2009 at 14:32:01 UTC, merlin wrote:
> 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)


I agree with your previous point but your type declaration syntax 
is still awful IMHO declaring int[Y][X] and then using [x][y]..
I don't like reading type declaration right-to-left and then 
normal code left-to-right..


> *) grammar not context free (so close, yet so far...)
> *) lousy exception handling implementation

You forgot no sane integer overflow behaviour, undefined program 
on overflow isn't a good default behaviour, it should be only a 
possible optimisation.
Same with array indexing.

renoX