Comment by mswphd
3 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.
3 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.
I suppose one could say that they didn't fix the data size so the language would be portable. But I can't see how the intent was that programs would be portable, if you define portable to mean 1:1 functioning across differing platforms.