Criticism of the C programming language: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 04:52, 4 January 2008

Revision as of 19:11, 11 January 2008

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* Similarity of the assignment and equality operators (<code>=</code> and <code>==</code>), making it easy to substitute one for the other. C's weak type system permits each to be used in the context of the other without a compilation error (although some compilers produce warnings). For example, the conditional expression in <code>if (a=b)</code> is only true if <code>a</code> is not zero after the assignment.<ref>http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~nxiao/cs10/errors.htm</ref>

* A lack of [[infix notation|infix]] operators for complex objects, particularly for string operations, making programs which rely heavily on these operations difficult to read.

* A declaration syntax that some find unintuitive, particularly for [[function pointer]]s. (Ritchie's idea was to declare identifiers in contexts resembling their use: "[[declaration reflects use]]".)

==Economy of expression==