@bison

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As someone who has nearly memorized appendix A of the K&R book (including the grammar)...

Hey, I taught myself C from the K&R book. I remember using C back when you declared a function argument's types in K&R style instead of ANSI style.

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I don't know enough about Ada to have an opinion.

I salute you, sir. Too few people are willing to say, "I don't know enough about X to have an opinion," especially on the internet. To wit, the entire "Cloanto acquire Amiga Inc Trademark" thread.

However, I do know enough about C to have an opinion. For instance, I once spent 2 weeks trying to debug a program that worked fine at the -O0 optimization level and crashed horribly whenever I selected -O1 or higher. It turned out that the error was the absence of a return statement in a function that was declared to return boolean. The compiler didn't utter so much as a peep, let alone halt and declare an error, because to the mind of C's designers, a function that declares that it returns boolean and fails to return anything at all is a feature, not a bug.

Some computer languages come with explicit warnings not to use them in critical situations. Java used to, though I haven't checked lately. K&R declined to submit C to the competition that resulted in Ada, admitting that it wasn't suitable for what the Department of Defense needed.

By contrast, Ada is almost certainly the programming language used in the last airplane you flew, the last train you rode, etc.

Game, set, match, people!

Last edited by simplex on 20-Apr-2021 at 09:45 PM.

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I've decided to follow an awful lot of people I respect and leave AmigaWorld. If for some reason you want to talk to me, it shouldn't take much effort to find me.