
Know Your Language: C Rules Everything Around Me (Part One) - edroche
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/know-your-language-c-rules-everything-around-me-part-one
======
kjs3
Really awful article.

 _Windows 10 may prove to be the de facto operating system of the Internet of
Things_

That's not even wrong...

 _Once the language had been named, things happened very fast and C started to
look much more like the C we use today, including the addition of boolean
operators like && and ||....These are extremely crucial programming building
blocks for not just C but most any language since._

Since C? Booleans? You mean like the and/or/not operators in Fortran (1957),
COBOL (1958), or Algol-60 (where they were even represented by funky
characters) to name a few? Simula-67 even had a boolean type which C didn't
pick up.

 _The C Programming Language, dubbed the "white book,"_

Is there anyone who actually called it anything other than "K&R"? I've sure
never heard it called the "white book".

 _In 1983, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) starting working
on a standard specification for C, with the result ratified finally in 1989 as
ANSI C. This basically enshrined a One True C, where programmers could be
assured that the language would behave the same no matter how or where it was
implemented._

I'm dubious the author has never programmed in C for anything other than x86.
He's certainly not tried to use ANSI C on, say a 36-bit or 60-bit machine. Or
a Harvard architecture machine. Or ported to an ISA with different endianness
or different load/store alignment restrictions. ANSI C doesn't even define the
size of a byte beyond "at least 8 bits". Need more? Google "undefined behavior
in ansi c" for a good laugh.

