On: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

[sparky]

To be fair, all widely-used C compilers I am aware of have extensions to the C90 and C99 standards, which they accept as conformant code by default.

[jrockway → sparky]

Sure, and that's fine. What Apple is doing is saying, "you must use C" without actually defining what "C" is.

[wglb → jrockway]

There was a hacker news discussion a while back by one of the principals of Coverity in which they asserted, with no small experience, that there is no such thing as a C language. This is due to the wide number of variations in what compilers accept and that users of C compilers expect.

Sure there is an ideal, but practically, there is not consistent definition of the C language.

[sparky → wglb]

The article discussed was this one in CACM (link is to discussion on Lambda the Ultimate) http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3824 . I remember seeing it on HN too, but couldn't find the page immediately.