> Has a simple mapping to the underlying hardware? That stopped being true three decades ago.
I've seen this claim repeated a few times in the thread and I still have no idea what it means.
For medium levels of optimisation it's usually very simple to predict what assembly code will be generated by C compilers. On many platforms the operators often match directly to a instruction (e.g. arithmetic and bitwise operations) or short patterns of instructions (the control flow primitives and conditional execution, equality testing, function calling, etc). At a higher level, compiled C functions look pretty much exactly like manually written assembly language procedures and structs are just blocks of memory with clear order and offsets. It's also very simple to interface C and assembly code without any hacks on either side.
I've seen this claim repeated a few times in the thread and I still have no idea what it means.
For medium levels of optimisation it's usually very simple to predict what assembly code will be generated by C compilers. On many platforms the operators often match directly to a instruction (e.g. arithmetic and bitwise operations) or short patterns of instructions (the control flow primitives and conditional execution, equality testing, function calling, etc). At a higher level, compiled C functions look pretty much exactly like manually written assembly language procedures and structs are just blocks of memory with clear order and offsets. It's also very simple to interface C and assembly code without any hacks on either side.