Only if you ignore
1. variadic arguments as in printf,
2. function pointers which are a very elementary (type-unsafe) form of closures,
3. a nice way of casting to void
4. setjmp and longjmp goodies (?) which allow you to code up co-routine libraries and exception handling mechanisms
I'm sure there are more such facets I am missing.
The elegance of the specification may be questionable, but the scope of what C tried to achieve is breathtaking. It actually is superior to most of its improvements.
Function pointers as an elementary form of closures, come on, what’s next? Closures are defined by capture. It’s nearly as fun as pretending C as coroutines because of setjmp.
How can a statement like C being semantically poor even be seen as controversial? For god sake, we are talking about a language which semantically doesn’t even have proper arrays.
> The elegance of the specification may be questionable, but the scope of what C tried to achieve is breathtaking. It actually is superior to most of its improvements.
Seriously? It wasn’t even a good language when it was released. Lisp and Pascal were far better. It won because of compiler availability and adequate performance on limited platforms.
HN really is a joke sometimes.
A lot of what I'm seeing from your comments here is you can't handle people who have something positive to say about C.
They're not saying it's the one true way or something. Just that they like it in some respect.
And your attempts to dismiss that and call "HN" a joke for harboring someone who thinks this way look kind of childish to me.
Considering I was having interesting discussion about the subtleties of the Hindley-Milner type system on this same website a decade ago, yes, I do think HN is becoming a joke. The joke is on me however because apparently I keep commenting for reasons which are not always apparent to me I must confess.
As proven by books like "A book on C" from 1984 (Robert Edward Berry and B. A. E. Meekings).
The question is about C semantics. Given the reply I get it’s pretty obvious that some here don’t understand what language semantics are. It’s about the amount of concepts you can express in the language. Haskell - a language I personally despise - is semantically very rich. So is modern C++ for what it’s worth. C simply isn’t.
It’s even deceiving sometimes because it has the apparence of having some semantic elements (arrays for exemple) which are not there in reality and are really only syntactic sugar on top of other semantic constructions(pointers).
I wish that C had a more rich way to define struct layouts and low-level representations for integral types.
I really like how Ada does it:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Representation...
If you need to read or write specialized hardware registers, being able to define a data structure with a custom representation is very nice and can save significant time and effort.
