Olin Lathrop wrote: > The first attempt at a high level language without real experience with > any high level language could have been a lot worse. You can only judge > a idea in the context of its own time. I wholeheartedly agree. > Now if you want to complain about C I won't argue. The state of compiler > development and the experience with how humans make coding mistakes and > how a compiler can help was far enough along that many design decisions > in C were irresponsible in my opinion, even when judged against the > information available at the time. C only became popular because it > tagged along with Unix. I think there's a major but common misunderstanding. IMO C is not a high level language, it is a structured (and reasonably portable) assembler. As such, it works quite well (for me; YMMV, of course -- and in your case it clearly does :) The origins of C support that: it was created to provide a (low level) implementation language of an OS, designed for being able to port the system to different hardware. That people then used it for everything else under the sun is not a wrong choice of the language designers. See also . > I shudder to think of the millions of man-hours wasted over the years due > to bad choices where the C designers should have known better. Or maybe also: I shudder to think of the millions of man-hours wasted over the years due to bad choices where the system architects should have known better (and should've chosen another language). But then, there's a reason why both Fortran and C are used to this day in applications where many better languages are available: huge libraries and large amounts of code that are already there and that are most easily interfaced from Fortran resp. C. (In a way, that is similar to the discussion about the choice of metric vs US domestic sized hardware we had a time ago.) Gerhard -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist