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Hacktical C: practical hacker's guide to the C programming language

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218 points signa11 | 2 comments | 14 Apr 25 10:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.41s | source
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pjmlp ◴[14 Apr 25 13:43 UTC] No.43681194[source]▶
> The reason I believe C is and always will be important is that it stands in a class of its own as a mostly portable assembler language, offering similar levels of freedom.

When your computer is a PDP-11, otherwise it is a high level systems language like any other.

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grandempire ◴[14 Apr 25 15:17 UTC] No.43682246[source]▶
Which other popular language more accurately represents a random access machine of fixed word length?
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alexvitkov ◴[14 Apr 25 15:22 UTC] No.43682309[source]▶
None, but that'a not what computers are. C assumes that in a few places, e.g. variadic functions, and those are the worst parts of the language.
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grandempire ◴[14 Apr 25 15:23 UTC] No.43682322[source]▶
> but that'a not what computers are

Which language more accurately represents hardware then?

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pjmlp ◴[14 Apr 25 15:35 UTC] No.43682466[source]▶
Assembly language from the hardware vendor.
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1. oguz-ismail ◴[14 Apr 25 15:40 UTC] No.43682533[source]▶
isn't it translated to microcode before being executed?
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2. pjmlp ◴[14 Apr 25 16:22 UTC] No.43682997[source]▶
Depends on the hardware design.