What's C's biggest mistake?

[Don]

Walter Bright wrote:
> dsimcha wrote:
>> I personally am a scientist (bioinformatics specifically) and I think 
>> having basic
>> complexity management in your code is worthwhile even at fairly small 
>> project
>> sizes.  I learned this the hard way.  For anything over about 100 
>> lines I want
>> some modularity (classes/structs, higher order functions, arrays that 
>> are more
>> than a pointer + a convention, etc.) so that I can tweak my scientific 
>> app easily.
>>  Furthermore, multithreading is absolutely essential for some of the 
>> stuff I do,
>> since it's embarrassingly parallel, and is a huge PITA in C.
> 
> 
> When I was working on converting Optlink to C, I thought long and hard 
> about why C instead of D. The only, and I mean only, reason to do it via 
> C was because part of the build process for Optlink used old tools that 
> did not recognize newer features of the OMF that D outputs.
> 
> Once it is all in C, the old build system can be dispensed with, and 
> then it can be easily converted to D.
> 
> If you want to, you can literally write code in D that is line-for-line 
> nearly identical to C, and it will compile to the same code, and will 
> perform the same.
> 
> You can do the same with C++ - Linus surely knows this, but I suspect he 
> didn't want to use C++ because sure as shinola, members of his dev team 
> would start using operator overloading, virtual base classes, etc.

Well, if you ask the question "what's C++'s biggest mistake?" it's much 
more difficult. C++'s failure to specify the ABI is enough of a reason 
to use C instead, I reckon. It think it's an appalling, inexcusable 
mistake -- it guaranteed compiled libraries 20 years later would use 
extern(C), not extern(C++). And that's not the worst C++ mistake.