Criticism of the C programming language: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 09:18, 2 September 2006

Revision as of 09:23, 2 September 2006

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===Maintenance===

There are other problems in C that don't directly result in bugs or errors, but make it harder for programmers to build a robust, maintainable, large-scale system. Examples of these include:

* A fragile system for importing definitions (<code>#include</code>) that relies on literal text inclusion and redundantly keeping prototypes and function definitions in sync, and drastically increases build times.

* A cumbersome compilation model that forces manualcomplicates dependency tracking and inhibits [[compiler optimization]]s between modules (except by [[linker|link-time]] optimization).

* A weak type system that lets many clearly erroneous programs compile without errors.