Criticism of the C programming language: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 19:01, 8 April 2008

Revision as of 15:30, 10 April 2008

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C does not have some features that are available in some other programming languages:

* No string datatype (strings are stored as character arrays)

* No assignment of arrays or strings (copying can be done via standard functions; assignment of objects having <code>struct</code> or <code>union</code> type is supported)

* No [[Garbage collection (computer science)|automatic garbage collection]]

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A number of these features are available as extensions in some compilers, or can be supplied by third-party libraries, or can be simulated by adopting certain coding disciplines. For example, in most object-oriented languages, method functions include a special "this" pointer which refers to the current object. By passing this pointer as an explicit function argument, similar functionality can be achieved in C. Whereas in C++ one might write:

<source lang="cpp"> stack.push(val);</source>

one would write in C:

<source lang="c"> push(&stack,val);</source>

==Undefined behaviour==