Re: do { quit; } else { }

On 13/04/2025 15:34, Kaz Kylheku wrote:

On 2025-04-13, bart <bc@freeuk.com> wrote:

On 13/04/2025 03:27, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

On 12.04.2025 13:00, bart wrote:

>

But I also 100% hate its syntax and various other bits and pieces. (OK,
about 80% then.)

>
(I also don't like its syntax too much. I think I'm just complaining
less than you about that. BTW, I've got the impression that all the
shortcomings of "C" are well known by most regulars here; they just
handle these facts in discussions differently than you.)

>
The shortcomings are downplayed considerably. Especially in discussions
involving me because they don't like it whenever someone states the obvious.
>
But also, most here have to use it professionally, so have learned to
work around it.

 There are lots of examples of people just liking C.

C itself, or the things that C allowed you to do?
I made a distinction a couple of posts up, where I said I liked what C could do, but not how it did it, in terms of language design.
People still like this class of language, even though now there are advanced alternatives (Rust etc) because of the freedom it allows and trust it puts in the programmer (even if C frowns on a lot of things via UB).
So it still comes down to there being few alternatives. Even where they exist, implementations may not be as ubiquitous or as mature as they are for C.
(When I generate C code it is for two reasons: for a target I don't directly support; or to use its optimising compilers. Or both.)

Oh, Donald Knuth, in a 1993 Computer Literacy Bookshops interview:
    CLB: Did you integrate WEB with C because so many programmers today
   are using it, or do you personally like C and write with it?
    Knuth: I think C has a lot of features that are very important. The
   way C handles pointers, for example, was a brilliant innovation; it
   solved a lot of problems that we had before in data structuring and
   made the programs look good afterwards. C isn't the perfect language,
   no language is, but I think it has a lot of virtues, and you can avoid
   the parts you don't like.

Well, given Knuth's own language was MIX (assembly for a made-up machine), it is not surprising he prefers C.
  I do like C as a language, especially

   because it blends in with the operating system (if you're using UNIX,
   for example).

This is something I cited as a disadvantage. If using Unix, you can't get away from the influence of C. But Windows was also implemented significantly in C; that does a much better job of hiding it.
It also, for people using Unix, puts other systems languages at a disadvantage because C gets all the breaks.

   All through my life, I've always used the programming language that
   blended best with the debugging system and operating system that I'm
   using. If I had a better debugger for language X, and if X went well
   with the operating system, I would be using that.
 Richard Stallman of the GNU Project: developed a C compiler and started
cloning Unix in the mid 1980's, entirely as free software.
 Billions of lines have been written in C as free open source since.
 The reason some people have to use it for work is, ironically, is that
people's unpaid side projects evolved into widely deployed platforms
that the world relies on.
 C has spawned imitation in the form of "C like" languages, that all
started as grenfield projects that could have chosen any syntax
they wanted.

Some of this is to be expected: if they started off using brace syntax, then their language will use braces. But some of the things they copy are odd, like this for-loop from JS:
   for(let i = 1; i <= 36; i++) {
Is it that hard to provide a proper for-loop where you don't have to spell out every single detail? Fortran managed it in the 1950s!