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

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218 points signa11 | 1 comments | 14 Apr 25 10:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.232s | 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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NoTeslaThrow ◴[14 Apr 25 15:41 UTC] No.43682554[source]▶
> When your computer is a PDP-11, otherwise it is a high level systems language like any other.

Describing C as "high-level" seems like deliberate abuse of the term. The virtual machine abstraction doesn't imply any benefits to the developer.

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1. timClicks ◴[14 Apr 25 16:19 UTC] No.43682952[source]▶
That's a curious remark, although I guess it doesn't look high level from the eyes of someone looking at programming languages today.

C has always been classed as a high level language since its inception. That term's meaning has shifted though. When C was created, it wasn't assembly (middle) or directly writing CPU op codes in binary/hex (low level).