Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!hao!boulder!sunybcs!ugfailau
From: ugfailau@sunybcs.uucp (Fai Lau)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: C critisisms
Message-ID: <7597@sunybcs.UUCP>
Date: 3 Jan 88 01:59:42 GMT
References: <11075@brl-adm.ARPA>
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Reply-To: ugfailau@joey.UUCP (Fai Lau)
Organization: SUNY/Buffalo Computer Science
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In article <11075@brl-adm.ARPA> V4039%TEMPLEVM.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU (Stan Horwitz) writes:
>
>  Regarding the critisms of C recently posted, as a new C programmer, just
>as a hobby ... not work related, I find the whole language very strange
>but intriguing.  It does offer the imagitive programmer lots of control
>not easily available in higher level languages.  It's syntax is strange
>but that can be fixed to some extent by simply creating a file with
>#DEFINE statements defining thins in easier terms.  I was tempted to
>set up just such a file of definitions with the goal of making the syntax
>appear similar to that of Pascal which I know very well, but this is not
>something one does when learning a language.  Some of the symbols used
>for operations are insane.  If more care were used by C's authors in
>selecting symbols to use, it would have made it a little more difficult
>to make stupid errors.

	C was designed for programmers who hate to type (and so
is the whole UN*X system). So some of the names may be strange, if
what you mean is their simplexity. For example, && stands for
.AND. and a+=b is a=a+b, etc.. You see, C was developed to
"get the job done", not as a result of some theories or research
findings (like Lisp and Pascal). Therefore it has little in the
area of defining symbols to be user friendly and easy to interpreate
in the context of a program. It offers the experienced programmers
a lot of power and convenience, but that's about it. Programs written
in this language is not the easiest to understand. Its syntex
isn't the most structured (a+=b == a=a+b, and you can take things
out of the for(..) and put it in the beginning of the loop body, etc.).
And it makes a poor choice as a tool to teach programming concepts.
C nevertheless allows the programmers to bypass all the BS in other
computer languages and just get down to business. It's quick and dirty,
but it works.

>   I have one question though.  The whole concept of C is in my opinion
>innovative in that the authors have developed a very powerful higher level
>assembly language.  It gives all the power of assembly language plus much
>more without sacrificing too much in the way of efficiency of object code.
>The question is, given the imagination of C's authors why couldn't they
>think of a better name to call the language?  Where the heck did the
>name come from?  Was the name C the result of a night of heavy drinking
>or what?  Not that it really matters, but I am just curious?
>
>   Happy New Year ... Stan Horwitz  V4039 at TEMPLEVM

	C stands for Compact, I think, referring to the nature of
the language. Considering the UN*X philophy in naming system
utilities, it is not surpprising that the name has been
consisting of one alphabet. 99% of the Unix utilities are written
in C, and it is correct that C was meant to substitute assembly
language for system programmings.

Fai  Lau
SUNY at Buffalo (The Arctic Wonderland)
UU: ..{rutgers,ames}!sunybcs!ugfailau
BI: ugfailau@sunybcs INT: ugfailau@cs.buffalo.EDU