Comment by mswphd
2 hours ago
isn't the whole point of C that it's portable assembly though? needing to understand the target platform/compiler's behavior to write correct code seems to cut against that claim quite a bit.
2 hours ago
isn't the whole point of C that it's portable assembly though? needing to understand the target platform/compiler's behavior to write correct code seems to cut against that claim quite a bit.
No. What gives that idea? The language doesn't even fix the data size of its primary numerical type. No way anyone thought that was portable.
Is this sarcasm? I thought C didn't fix the size of int because they were trying to make C programs "portable" between architectures with different natural word sizes. It was a mistake, but I remember that as being the stated reason. I'm happy to be corrected if I'm misremembering my history though.