Re: [RFC] Convert builin-mailinfo.c to use The Better String Library.

From: Walter Bright <boost@digitalmars.com>
Date: Sep 7, 2007, 20:49 UTC
Message-ID: <fbsdga$iat$1@sea.gmane.org>
In-Reply-To: <85wsv22ry8.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>

David Kastrup wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> In my opinion there is basically one area which C has botched up
> seriously in order to be useful as a general purpose language, and
> that is conflating pointers and arrays, and allowing pointer
> arithmetic.  The consequences are absolutely awful with regard to
> compilers being able to optimize, and it is pretty much the primary
> reason that Fortran is still quite in use for numerical work.

I agree. It's one of those things that probably sounded like a good idea at the time. The consequences were not foreseen. All languages have a few of these (C++ has the infamous use of < > for template arguments).

$ cat FOOTERMessages come from the public archive at lore.kernel.org/git, fetched every hour. The front page is chosen and written each morning by an AI editor and can be wrong; the threads themselves are the record. About and API. For agents: an MCP server at https://gitlist.dev/mcp, and any thread, story or person page as Markdown by adding .md to its URL (or sending Accept: text/markdown). Details in /llms.txt.