Dennis Ritchie, Creator of C Programming Language, Passed Away

WankerWeasel writes "The sad news of the death of another tech great has come. Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language and a key developer of the Unix operating system, has passed away. For those of us running Mac OS X, iOS, Android and many other non-Windows OS, we have him to thank. Many of those running Windows do too, as many of the applications you're using were written in C."

Comments

Re:Not just the apps

[TheRaven64]

C is actually a subset of c++ as in all c programs will compile with a c++ compiler but C++ will not compile in a c compiler.

No it isn't. Some examples:

int class;

Valid C, not valid C++. How about a more complicated one?

int f();
int g()
{
f(1, 2, "three");
}

Valid C, not valid C++. Or another simple one:

int a;
void *foo = &a;
int *b = foo;

Once again, valid C, not valid C++. The semantics of inline are very different in C and C++. And here's a really fun one:

#include <stdio.h>

int foo;

int main(void)
{
struct foo { int a, b, c; };
printf("%d\n", (int)sizeof(foo));
return 0;
}

If sizeof(int) is 4 and alignof(int) is 4, this prints 4 in C and 12 in C++.

Why am I such a geek?

I didn't know that the definition of 'geek' had been changed to 'someone who believes falsehoods'.