C isn’t a programming language anymore • The Register

C isn’t a programming language anymore • The Register

C is often praised for being “close to the metal,” for being a “portable assembly language.”It was, once, but it hasn’t been since the 1970s; the underlying computational models of modern computers are nothing like the one that C represents, which was designed for a 1970s 16-bit minicomputer.

C is not just a programming language, it’s also an Interface Definition Language or IDL. IDLs are very important – as we quoted back in 1999, “the CORBA Interface Definition Language IDL is… ‘one of the most significant contributions in the history of computer science’.”

 

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