Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Keith Thompson Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: IEEE: C is the first programming language Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 11:56:34 -0700 Organization: None to speak of Lines: 23 Message-ID: References: <373211b1-a3c7-4b42-85d7-0862cc962b08@googlegroups.com> <025b517e-bd9e-4464-ab32-0d5cadb4bf99@googlegroups.com> <89da2b68-5170-4c9c-8cd8-ab7e552b0fce@googlegroups.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="945944de09706c9b4e29b53c9d2efdc2"; logging-data="2912"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/cS+onXW24vvrWqjAGNWlC" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.1 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:KkKpcwqBPDNv0LxbyLNDM9FCQEs= sha1:RIuTjFteH2gbKhc+vpLf7YkbwaY= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.c:91265 supercat@casperkitty.com writes: > On Thursday, July 28, 2016 at 11:07:00 AM UTC-5, Keith Thompson wrote: [...] >> In modern terms, printf is part of the implementation, and its code is >> free to depend on any compiler-specific behavior it likes. Ritchie >> presumably would not have relied on that assumption if he were writing >> code intended to run on one's-complement systems. > > Clearly Dennis Ritchie didn't expect that the code would work as written on > platforms with 32-bit two's-complement integers (it would work just fine > given ones'-complement or sign-magnitude integers of any size). On the > other hand, I think he would have expected that it should work on any 16-bit > system whose hardware uses two's-complement silent-wraparound semantics. So he was clearly writing non-portable code that he knew would work on the system and compiler he was using. I don't think you can legitimately draw any deeper conclusions from that. -- Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) kst-u@mib.org Working, but not speaking, for JetHead Development, Inc. "We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this." -- Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, "Yes Minister"