alt Hacker NewsC array types are weird because C doesn't really need arrays. It's not what C was about.
But if you designed a language in the era where Fortran, THE array language, reigned supreme, nobody would use your language. The mindshare Fortran had is difficult to convey now, half a century later.
Think of it like making a chatbot today and not mentioning AI or LLMs, that's what making a language without arrays would have felt like in 1970.
Replies
i learned FORTRAN in an accelerated tech program in 1996-ish in high school.
i used fortran recently to see how "slow" python is, i did matrix multiplies by hand in .c, and .py. Now i didn't write the fortran, the AI did, but i remember enough that i verified what it did was sane, also the other two i wrote did agree with results.
fortran 1 unit of time
C 1.7 unit of time
python 2.2 unit of time
anyhow, 1996-ish. crazy.
> C array types are weird because C doesn't really need arrays. It's not what C was about.
I would phrase that differently: "The main feature of arrays (performing the `base + index * size` address computation) is already provided by the C pointer type via the `ptr[N]` syntax sugar, so having a separate array type might have felt redundant at the time".
I think having "proper" array types in a language (where the type carries both the array item type and the comptime length) only really makes sense when there's also a slice type (e.g. a runtime ptr/length pair). And I guess at any point during C's development this was a too big language change for the committee to swallow.
this exactly. if you need arrays or sequences of objects/memory items u can trivially implement them :/. why does it need to be embedded in the language?? people want the language to do all the programming for them. I suppose this is why they like LLMs too..
they should pay programmers less. get rid of all these moneygrabs
People who do HPC in C actually wish C had proper arrays like Fortran. If your function takes two pointers as inputs instead of two arrays they can alias the same memory and in fact they may alias any other pointer of the same type. Writing into one of them invalidates all the values you have in registers so you have to load them again.
The "restrict" keyword was invented to solve this but it still has weaker semantics than original Fortran arrays. It can still solve a big share of problems, but it never got proper adoption and never even made it into C++.