From: Walter Bright Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2007 20:49:23 GMT Subject: Re: [RFC] Convert builin-mailinfo.c to use The Better String Library. Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <85wsv22ry8.fsf@lola.goethe.zz> David Kastrup wrote: > 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).