how relevant is C today?

[Mirco Wahab]

Hi Scott

your summary looks very concise and
good to read. I'd like  to make some
minor additions,

> C can express neither exceptions nor coroutines (nor their fancy cousin,
> continuations), which could be and were expressed in assembly.  Nor does
> C provide memory management.  A few library functions give you some
> primitives to roll your own, but garbage collection is out of the
> question (despite Hans Boehm), because the language does not carry
> enough infrastructure to find type information through introspection.

So, al-imho, C 'abstracts out' some consistent
'von-Neumann' or 'Harvard-' machine from any
architecture where its ported to. And that
is - imho - the main strength of C.

It covers well most machine code vs. C instruction mapping (~1:1),
and RAM storage vs. coressponding data representation (1:1),
as you said partially.

It can't handle any aspect beyond these simple
mappings in its language core, this is where
more complex bulding blocks (libraries) will
come into play.

> In exchange for these losses, the C programmer can write code that
> executes in response to an external signal and yet does not create a
> total hash of the internal memory structures.  That kind of thing is
> important in an OS, and something few languages (including C++) can do.
> If you intend to study C++, study C first (it is easier to grasp), as
> almost everything you learn in C can be used in C++.  C++ is a  "big"
> language, while C is a "small" one; it will take much longer to "know"
> C++ even though C++ started with the goal of being "C with objects."
> If you are interested in languages, reading "the Design and Evolution
> of C++" is a great base; it explains how C++ got the way it is from its
> initial design goals.

I would say, from my own experience, that you wouldn't
use all C++ features in all C++ projects. Most people
I know would write C programs 'camouflaged' as C++,
that is: write clean & simple C - and use some C++
features e.g, class bound methods for interfaces -
but no inheritance at all (use compound objects) and
no exceptions (handle errors 'the olden way').

Regards

M.