Ariel Rocholl wrote:
>> ... The
>> only reason for deliberately weakening type checking is that the
>> designers of C found it irritating.
>
> Do you know this for a fact or is this a guess? I can think of
> reasons why this may have happened different than that, and don't
> recall any text of K&R stating this.

It seems a logical conclusion given the evidence.  I do remember K or R
talking somewhere about a compiler not "getting in the way", which sounds
like what I mean.

Bob Ammerman pointed out that C was developed on a small machine and they
might not have had the room to do type checking.  Maybe there is some truth
there.  I do know other compilers existed for that machine.  I expect the
compiler itself wasn't pushing the machine to its limits.  Note that type
checking doesn't make the compiled code any bigger, which is usually the
issue on a small machine, it only requires a bit more work in the compiler
itself.


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