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From: bart <bc@freeuk.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Loops (was Re: do { quit; } else { })
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2025 20:36:35 +0100
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On 19/04/2025 20:15, James Kuyper wrote:
> On 19.04.2025 00:27, bart wrote:
>> On 18/04/2025 19:10, James Kuyper wrote:
> ...
>>> If all you can do is "hope for the best", you're doing it wrong. It's
>>> your job to ensure that they are not arbitrary unrelated expressions,
>>> but correctly related expressions, and that's no different from your
>>> responsibility for all of the other expressions that make up your
>>> program.
> ...
>>> If you find that problematic, you shouldn't be programming in
>>> any language, but certainly not in C.
>>
>> I see it didn't take you long to get to the personal insult. What is it
>> with this group?
> 
> You are constantly complaining about how difficult you find it to be to
> deal with various features of C that most C programmers have little or
> no trouble dealing with.


> How could I possibly justify concluding that
> the problem lies anywhere other than in your own abilities?

Did I say I find it difficult? I said the feature was: Poor, Crude, 
Primitive, Error prone, Hard to grok, a PITA to write, among other things.

You can argue with some of those if you like, but one problem is seeing 
a complex line headed 'for(...' and now you have to spend time 
disentangling it to find out what category of loop was intended. EVERY 
such loop starts with 'for'!

So your attitude is to totally ignore such criticism? C is perfect? It's 
a wonder any other HLL was ever devised!

> ...
>> The language will not check that those three parts are correct for the
>> loop you are trying to express, because there is no way for it to know
>> that.
> 
> Yes, it also doesn't check that the three parts that make up A = B + C;
> make sense together. That's the developer's responsibility, not the
> language's.

You don't think the language could have helped more?

People do use big compilers now to do a lot of deep analysis of code; 
are you saying those compilers are not necessary, developers should be 
able to figure things out for themselves?

Or are you saying that it's OK for additional tooling to help out a 
developer, but it is out of the question for a language to provide a 
more convenient feature?

This is now interesting: suppose I were to say to David Brown that if he 
can't do his work without his advanced compilers, he shouldn't be coding 
in C?

This is EXACTLY what you are saying. And it is an insult.