Re: language design after Algol 60, was Add nested-function support

On 2018-04-10, Martin Ward <martin@gkc.org.uk> wrote:
> Yet, for all that complexity, "C combines the power of assembly language
> with the flexibility of assembley language"!


Not so; C provides no portable way to inspect the stack or machine
registers. Writing a precisely-tracing garbage collector which can
look for root pointers in the stack is possible in assembly language;
only a conservative approach is feasible in anything remotely resembling
portable C.


Assembly languages are predictable; for instance, they have defined
behaviors on integer overflow.


Decent quality instruction sets architectures provide ways to catch
an exception in a handler which can precisely re-start the program from
the faulting point after doing some fixup. Almost anything can be
treated in a way that assures safety: illegal instruction, division by zero.


In assembly languages, a pointer value held in a register doesn't become
"indeterminate" just because it was passed to some free()-like function.
(And other such nonsense fictions.)

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