Per Vognsen on Nostr: Wirth had a great quote I vaguely recall from one of his books or papers, but I ...
Wirth had a great quote I vaguely recall from one of his books or papers, but I haven't been able to track it down, so I might have spliced the memory together from several places. Basically, his philosophy of compiler design was that a compiler for a given language should only optimize what cannot be explicitly written at the source level. He mentions array address CSE as an example, which unlike in Wirth's Oberon/Pascal is actually not required in C, since C has first-class interior pointers.
Published at
2026-10-19 10:31:30 UTCEvent JSON
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