Yet C23 isn't K&R C any longer, nor is the hardware a PDP 11.

Also when we eventually start talking to agents that perform the whole execution steps by themselves, that is kind of irrelevant.

Except for the lucky ones that still code to keep the infrastructure going, which is mostly C++.

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uecker 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The "nor is the hardware a PDP 11". Byte access was the main new feature of the PDP 11 that C adopted. Are you saying being able to access individual bytes is not relevant on modern hardware?

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pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It is, however hardly something unique to C, as the C crowd pretends it to be.

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shakna 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Might more mean that we've standardised on a few things like what a byte even is.

The PDP-11 had both 8 and 9-bit bytes. Thats a complexity that few programmers have to touch on, today.

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elch 6 hours ago | parent [-]

IIRC PDP-11 was a 16 bit word machine with an 8-bit byte. Maybe you remember PDP-10 with 4x9=36 bit words?

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zabzonk 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Actually, if you were mad enough to use the feature, the Dec10 had 6-bit "bytes" - 6 to a word.

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uecker 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anyway, I do not see how this affects the design of C in a way that makes no sense anymore today (except that one could require CHAR_BIT to be eight, but there are still DSPs where this is not the case). I think people repeat the "the C design reflects the out-dated PDP-11 hardware" meme because it sounds smart while in reality it is just nonsense.

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pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent [-]

So when is WG14 standardising modern hardware into the C standard?

Basic stuff like SIMD, SIMT, without requiring users to go beyond language extensions, something that any programming language can offer in similar capacity?

	▲	uecker 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Ah, the "what is not standardized does not exist" argument again.

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shakna 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

On the 11, the UNIBUS was 18 bit, the program space was 16 bit, and addressing was 22 bit. So it depended if you were using I-space or D-space.

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flohofwoe 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The PDP-11 myth is getting a bit tired by now ;)

If C would be so hardwired to the PDP-11 architecture it would have died with it. In reality C works just fine on all sorts of hardware (like GPUs) with only minor extensions.

	▲	pjmlp 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Just like plenty of other programming languages. I am also tired that language extensions in C to work around ISO defencies is considered an advantage when argued by C folks, while at the same time it is considered a language design fault when the same crowd points to other programming languages.