🚀 go-pugleaf

I (Douglas M. Pase) write:
- plus it allows access to the "bare metal", etc.

Henry Spencer writes:
-One of C's strengths -- and a major reason for its popularity --
-is that it *does* let you get at much of the underlying machine if you
-really want to *and* understand your implementation in detail.

In article <oberon.7924> blarson@skat.usc.edu (Bob Larson) writes:
-AND your machine happens to match C fairly well AND your implimentation
-does a straitforward mapping.

-C is a high level language that closely models some common
-architectures.  It is a mistake to think it can be used for "access to
-the 'bare metal'" without specifying what 'bare metal' you are
-thinking of.  (Not all the world is a vax or pdp11 or 68k or spark.)

K&R page 180 reads: "...  Some implementations also reserve the words
*fortran* and *asm*.  ..."

For those implementations which support ``asm'', you may insert assembler
code directly into the program.  That sounds like "bare metal" to me.  Try
putting a few

	asm("assembler code goes here");

statements in your code and dumping the assembler listing.  If you want to
argue that it's not "real ``C''" go ahead, but that's not my problem.
-- 
Doug Pase  --  ...ucbvax!tektronix!ogcvax!pase  or  pase@cse.ogc.edu (CSNet)