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Björn Lundin writes:
> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>
>> To people like me who migrated from assembler to C, it was heaven.
>
> And the intention of the language. To be portable assembler.
I’m not sure that’s born out by the history (e.g. [1]). In DMR’s account
the original goal was to be an implementation language for Unix. The
interest in portability is several years later and (in the same article)
the only reference to ‘portable assembler’ references C’s use as an
intermediate language in compilers for other languages, hardly a
recommendation for general-purpose use (the same description could be
applied to LLVM IR just as easily).
[1] https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html
I don’t think ‘portable assembler’ is a remotely good description of C
in any case. In assembler, almost every operation has a very
well-defined meaning, defined purely in terms of the bit patterns of the
operands to an instruction, and perhaps the CPU state etc, but with no
reference to value type or provenance. In contrast in C the rules are
much more complicated, and getting it wrong leads to programs behaving
in rather strange and unpredictable ways.
--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/
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