C is Brittle D is Plastic

[Cid Lib]

On Friday, 3 April 2026 at 18:49:19 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 4/3/2026 12:03 AM, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole wrote:
>> You should be contacting Uecker who is leading the memory 
>> safety workgroup. 
>> https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3211.pdf
>
> Done.

If I were on the ISO C Committee, I would not see my job as 
'fixing' C, by trying to give it a brain, but rather ensuring the 
language remains the 'somewhat' mindless guardian of legacy code 
that it is, while simultaneously ensuring it remains a language 
that can continue to be used in cases where it would not be 
considered professionally negligent to do so.

The only proposal I would 100% vote for, would be a proposal for 
categorizing the C language to the world more correctly - i.e. 
renaming it to UnsafeC (for example).

Every attempt to 'fix' C, eventually just results in a different 
language entirely.

"The great thing about C is that it doesn't try to be smarter 
than you. If I see p = q, I know exactly what the CPU is doing. 
If p is a fat pointer, now the compiler is doing multi-word 
copies and hidden arithmetic behind my back. And that is not C!" 
- (A Hypothetical Linus)