Comment by drnick1
4 hours ago
Yes and no. Clearly what you said is true, but the more profound reason is that C just minimally reflects how computers work. The rest is just convention.
4 hours ago
Yes and no. Clearly what you said is true, but the more profound reason is that C just minimally reflects how computers work. The rest is just convention.
It minimally reflects PDP-11 assembly, which is not how modern computers work.
> C just minimally reflects how computers work. The rest is just convention.
This hasn't been true for decades. x86 assembly is now itself an abstraction over what the CPU is actually doing.
Microcode, speculative execution, etc.
It seems to be a meme on HN that C doesn't reflect hardware, now you're extending that to assembly. It seems silly to me. It was always an approximation of what happens under the hood, but I think the concepts of pointers, variable sizes and memory layout of structs all represent the machine at some level.