Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Baffling? Yes. Weird? Not so much. Just ill thought out.

It's tremendously well thought out, actually. It just doesn't do what you 
want it to do. But C was much better thought out than a lot of the stuff 
that came after it. After all, what did they add to it? ANSI type 
declarations. Structure assignment. That's pretty much it on the significant 
changes.

There were a number of languages in the 90's less well thought out, wherein 
(for example) a leading 0 on a number meant it was octal *even if* you read 
it from the terminal, or a \0 meant the end of the string but there weren't 
any mem___() functions. Etc.

> Somebody somewhere obviously thought that treating characters and arrays 
> as the same type was a good idea...

Characters and arrays aren't the same type. If you look at C and recognise 
that every manipulable value fits in a machine word, the type system makes 
much more sense. (Broken, of course, with structure assignment, which wasn't 
in the original C version.)

Other than "I don't understand the type system" and "they could have done 
better if they were writing a different language", what do you think is 
poorly thought out?  (I'll grant the whole idea of the need for header files 
is kind of silly, but there *are* limitations you put on a language whose 
compiler has to fit in 32K.)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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