If you stopped at that sentence, then the rest of my comment might clarify. It's...

rewmie · on June 22, 2023

> background. How long have you been programming in C?

Since the mid 90s.

> Have you encountered TAOCP and MIX/MMIX?

I fail to see the relevance.

> Do you write strictly standards compliant C?

There is no such thing as non-strictly standards compliant C. It's either C, as specified by one of the international standards, or K&R C for those who can't target a standard, or things that are not C.

> Did you use to read or post on comp.lang.c?

Yes.

What was your point?

vba616 · on June 24, 2023

The relevance of MIX/MMIX is that to me, MIX is a lot like C in its aspirations and failures as time passed it by. Knuth described similar motivations in terms of portability, not wanting to choose a favorite architecture, and so on. But it ended up being an incredibly baroque, opaque, and obscure way to show algorithms, even though he meant it to be more concrete and relevant than pseudocode.

Then MMIX seems to me to sort of concede that sample code should be a little more like real life code, while still being far more difficult to follow than need be.

Some people just love complications for their own sake, like a medieval monk illuminating a manuscript. That's not wrong, but it's not right for everyone.

The issue I have is with people falsifying the reasons that C can be attractive. The IOCCC is the essence of what C is actually about. It is just not anything like an elegant "high level assembler" that reflects machine architecture. Maybe there is an alternative these days that fits the bill better, or maybe not.

>There is no such thing as non-strictly standards compliant C. It's either C, as specified by one of the international standards, or K&R C for those who can't target a standard, or things that are not C.

Well, here we go. First of all, the tone of this statement takes me back to clc. I could almost believe it's a direct quote.

Secondly, I haven't written a great deal of C code in the last 40 years, all told, but I was writing C code before C89 (and you, I infer, were not). It certainly wasn't K&R C, and it couldn't be standard C if that wasn't invented yet, right?

Everything meaningful "written in C", I think, falls into your category of "things that are not C". Like the Linux kernel.

That's just annoying to some people like it was when "kilobytes" were renamed "kibibytes" or "dwarf planets" were suddenly not "planets".

But shouldn't it bring with it a tiny bit of doubt that there might be something wrong with the ideals of the orthodox? There are many belief systems that have proved impossible for humans to follow, and just because many people are hypocrites doesn't mean that we should define ideals people strive for such that everyone becomes a hypocrite.

If people say undefined behavior allows your program to blow up the world, that is not debatable in isolation, as all definitions are arbitrary. But it is inconsistent with ever using or encouraging anyone else to ever use the language.

>What was your point?

I was pretty cautious. I think I read the FAQ as one was instructed to. I don't know if I ever posted any questions at all. I read it, and the arguments with newbies who over time increasingly seemed like trolls, as entertainment. Same as with the Ayn Rand worshipping Objectivists, the anarchists, or the Holocaust deniers in other groups.

I used to think, no matter how certain people are in their rectitude, can they not see it's leading to endless flamewars where people just wind them up for fun? What do they think the group is for? Do they make the connection that ultimately it is for whatever actually exists in that space? Do they really want what exists there?