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 17 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 an hour 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 9 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.