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

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218 points signa11 | 7 comments | 14 Apr 25 10:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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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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pjmlp ◴[14 Apr 25 15:28 UTC] No.43682371[source]▶
I don't know, Ada, Modula-2, Object Pascal, PL/I, NEWP, PL.8, D, Zig, Mesa, ATS,....

But then again, you booby trapped the question with popular language.

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1. grandempire ◴[14 Apr 25 15:49 UTC] No.43682636[source]▶
Many of those languages do not have pointers - which are fundamental to how modern instruction sets work.
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2. pjmlp ◴[14 Apr 25 16:15 UTC] No.43682903[source]▶
Yes they do, point an example from that group, and I will gladly prove you wrong.
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3. ◴[14 Apr 25 16:23 UTC] No.43682999[source]▶
4. grandempire ◴[14 Apr 25 17:00 UTC] No.43683399[source]▶
Well sounds like you are confident and we are going to get into a semantic argument about what qualifies as a pointer.

So which of these languages do you think is a better representation of hardware and not a PDP-11?

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5. pjmlp ◴[15 Apr 25 05:53 UTC] No.43689392{3}[source]▶
Better representation of the hardware?

None of them, you use Assembly if you want the better representation of hardware.

Yes, I am quite confident, because I have been dispelling the C myth of the true and only systems programming language since the 1990's.

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6. grandempire ◴[15 Apr 25 16:56 UTC] No.43695517{4}[source]▶
So then your comment about C being an outdated PDP-11 must be equally true of other languages. So it says nothing.
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7. pjmlp ◴[16 Apr 25 11:02 UTC] No.43703827{5}[source]▶
Not really, some of those languages predate the very existence of C and PDP-11.