Re: "A diagram of C23 basic types"

On 02/04/2025 17:26, Muttley@DastardlyHQ.org wrote:

On Wed, 2 Apr 2025 16:59:45 +0200
David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wibbled:

On 02/04/2025 16:05, Muttley@DastardlyHQ.org wrote:

I suspect the people who are happy with C never have any correspondence with
anyone from the committee so they get an entirely biased sample. Just like
its usually only people who had a bad experience that fill in "How did we do"

>

surveys.

>
And I suspect that you haven't a clue who the C standards committee talk
to - and who those people in turn have asked.

 By imference you do - so who are they?

That's an unwarranted inference.  I assume that they talk with compiler developers, library developers, and representatives of at least some users (typically from large companies or major projects).  And those people will have contact with and feedback from their users and developers.  I did "know" (in the sense of email and Usenet conversations, rather than personally) one person who used to be on the C standards committee, and know a little of how he handled things at the committee.  So no, I did not say I had any special knowledge here - I simply stated that it is clear that /you/ have no idea.

 

11. nullptr for clarity and safety.

 Never understood that in C++ never mind C. NULL has worked fine for 50 years.

If ignorance really is bliss, you must be the happiest person around. Or you can read one of my other posts pointing out the advantages of nullptr.

 

12. Some improvements to variadic macros.

 Might be useful. Would be nice to pass the "..." args directly through to lower
level functions without having to convert them to a va_list first.
 

18. "unreachable()" is now standard.

 Googled it - don't see the point. More syntatic noise.

Ignorant and proud of it!

 

19. printf (and friends) support for things like "%w32i" as the format
specifier for int32_t, so that we no longer need the ugly PRIi32 style
of macro for portable code with fixed-size types.

 If you do a lot of cross platform code might be useful.
 To be honest you can do most of you posted already - just compile C with a C++
compiler. Seems a case of catch up me-too.
 

  A number of these changes did come over from C++, yes.  That does not mean they are not useful or wanted in C - it means the C world is happy to let C++ go first, then copy what has been shown to be useful.  I think that is a good strategy.
Some people (including me) will choose to use C++, but others prefer to (or are required to) use C.