Re: OT: Programming Languages

On Sat, 02 Nov 2024 07:42:19 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid>
wrote:

On a sunny day (Fri, 1 Nov 2024 18:04:21 -0000 (UTC)) it happened Cursitor
Doom <cd999666@notformail.com> wrote in <vg3575$3bio0$1@dont-email.me>:
>

You can call me old fashioned, but I still believe there's never been a
more elegant computer language than the original K&R C. You can keep the
rest; I'll stick with that.

>
Agree, I use C only and asm when needed.
I started with binary interfacing hardware...
Nothing of all of that was hard.
>
BASIC was fun too, but very limiting, slow interpreted language.

PowerBasic is a fabulous compiler. We did one contest, an array math
signal processing thing. I wrote it in PB, another guy in c. Mine ran
4 times as fast.  He played with the code and compiler optimiztions
for a couple of days and got it up to about 60% as fast as my PB
version.

I used the obvious FOR loop with subscripts to scan the array. He used
pointers.

c is really a PDP-11 assembler. In the early days of PDP-11
programming, everybody was fascinated with using pointers to wander up
and down the world, and with pushing stuff onto the stack. It shows in
c now.