Path: csiph.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Ian Collins Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: usecases of void foo(char **b) {} Date: Sat, 5 Nov 2016 08:14:06 +1300 Lines: 28 Message-ID: References: <2bf83e98-eb96-4ab6-b1ca-4e6a8bd824f5@googlegroups.com> <5b33a608-8f61-4ea0-be08-080018f5772c@googlegroups.com> <87mvhjo3jw.fsf@bsb.me.uk> <3a09f5ec-d4f7-40fa-9855-b5c3f02ce4e9@googlegroups.com> <87ziljks6k.fsf@bsb.me.uk> <2199a2dd-d844-4f8d-bfe0-6a7c2854277b@googlegroups.com> <87twbqlsin.fsf@bsb.me.uk> <87oa1yljof.fsf@bsb.me.uk> <4c243d9f-8b30-4c8f-aeb7-f98b67df53df@googlegroups.com> <2609ed15-7c52-4d08-bf8c-2b9ef44fa809@googlegroups.com> <89e9cc99-3b51-44f1-91bc-f74b6f2b7f5a@googlegroups.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net zhz5p8u70ji12DDN6IRGIQMoWKUoIQO4tSGdnmesGYlPMJDBKd Cancel-Lock: sha1:h45HzEananpjHjrrXTB+rBZkQ4U= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; SunOS i86pc; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.5.1 In-Reply-To: <89e9cc99-3b51-44f1-91bc-f74b6f2b7f5a@googlegroups.com> Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.c:95789 On 11/ 5/16 03:57 AM, supercat@casperkitty.com wrote: > On Friday, November 4, 2016 at 3:53:53 AM UTC-5, David Brown wrote: >> On 03/11/16 19:59, Ian Collins wrote: >> I was doing that on 68k's (the MC68332, to be precise - you might have >> come across it) in the late nineties. And I was doing it well into the >> naughties with compilers for small embedded micros. >> >> I don't miss that work - progress in development tools is a good thing. > > It's a fine thing if the tools continue to support old semantics. In some > cases, though, some of the semantics that old tools naturally supported > allowed things to be written more readably and/or efficiently than would > be possible using modern tools. To my mind, ditching the old semantics > is a step backward. In some cases? Older compilers lacked the sophisticated optimisations we have become used to so they had to fall back to lower level fiddles. I would love to have the chance to rebuild some of my old projects with a modern compiler and see how much faster the code runs. It my not be much faster because of all of the work I had to do to squeeze performance out of the old tools. But I bet it would run much faster than the more readable original code ran before all those days and weeks of assembly analysis and code restructures. Like David, I don't miss that work. -- Ian