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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: 0.206s | 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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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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guywithahat ◴[14 Apr 25 15:43 UTC] No.43682583[source]▶
If a language is unpopular, people won't want to work for you and you'll run into poor support. Rewriting a library may take months of dev time, whereas C has an infinite number of libraries to work with and examples to look at.
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ryao ◴[16 Apr 25 05:24 UTC] No.43701784[source]▶
wears math hat

C does not have an infinite number of libraries and examples. The number of libraries and examples C has is quite large, and there are an infinite number of theoretically possible libraries and examples, but the number of libraries and examples that exist are finite.

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1. Koshkin ◴[16 Apr 25 23:26 UTC] No.43711414[source]▶
The infinite is a convenient abstraction of the finite.