Very strong feeling of deja vu: I read this in the early 1980s, uplifting my career from a Pascal based university course (York) to life as a systems programmer in networking using v7 on pdp11, and 4.1BSD on Vaxes and subsequently 4.2
re-reading it, I suggest he made one strong statement I'd say more weakly: saying there is no type cast/overloading but there is of a (bad) kind: you can use union types (variant records) to do this, if the compiler will let you. Deeply painful, and completely stupid, but you can coerce your code to treat memory regions as different 'types' of thing in some ways. I guess the pain of alignment and knowing how your compiler dealt with variant types would get in the way here.
Ironic for pascal fans how he notes all but one of the systems for pascal was written in C. I can't think of a better advert for C as a systems programming language.
Software tools was great. I struggled a bit with the Ratfor thing, but in the end, learned a lot reading it.
re-reading it, I suggest he made one strong statement I'd say more weakly: saying there is no type cast/overloading but there is of a (bad) kind: you can use union types (variant records) to do this, if the compiler will let you. Deeply painful, and completely stupid, but you can coerce your code to treat memory regions as different 'types' of thing in some ways. I guess the pain of alignment and knowing how your compiler dealt with variant types would get in the way here.
Ironic for pascal fans how he notes all but one of the systems for pascal was written in C. I can't think of a better advert for C as a systems programming language.
Software tools was great. I struggled a bit with the Ratfor thing, but in the end, learned a lot reading it.