IOC is inside Clang-head

[Walter Bright]

On 1/29/2013 8:48 AM, deadalnix wrote:
> Is that a practical limitation ? All widespread arch I know assembly for are 2
> complement, and it seems like something settled now in the field. Or am I
> unaware of some important stuff ?

One's complement machines existed when I was a wee laddie, but I haven't heard 
of any since.

C (and C++) also "support" things like bytes that are larger than 8 bits. Yes, 
there are >8 bit byte CPUs in the form of specialized DSP processors, and yes, 
there are C compilers for them.

But I can't think of a single non-trivial C program that could be compiled for 
greater than 8 bit bytes without extensive refactoring, so having Standard C 
"support" such is mostly an exercise in theater and is useless in real life.

Even worse is all the millions of man-hours wasted in (usually incorrectly) 
trying to make C code portable to theoretical C compilers that have ints larger 
than 32 bits, etc., trying to ensure that modern C code will work on a 16 bit C 
compiler, and on and on.

By defining these problems out of existence, D achieves a major simplification 
in terms of programming bugs that are far more theoretical than real.

One real issue is order of evaluation bugs, but I didn't see a note about that 
in the Clang list.