I suppose I could but that'd be too complicated for my taste. In fact I wouldn't even need to go that far. Many of the most useful things are implemented as extensions to C89 in the popular compilers. Instead I stuck to pure C89 which I knew would be universally implemented. I like knowing that I can set GCC to ansi + pedantic and have a reasonable expectation of no drastic surprises.
C89 is primitive but charming in the simplicity. For instance while I disliked being forced to declare a function's variables before any code I now see that it encouraged me to keep functions very small. I would find ways to use fewer variables. Instead of 'for(int i = 0; i < max; i++)' I would use 'while(--max >= 0)', anything to avoid moving my cursor to the top of the function.
On the other hand I miss C++'s exceptions. Checking for errors all over the place gets ugly and bloats the codebase. What would otherwise be a two line copy operation between two objects gets two if blocks added which handle the miniscule chance of memory allocation failure in some other deeper frame.
C89 is primitive but charming in the simplicity. For instance while I disliked being forced to declare a function's variables before any code I now see that it encouraged me to keep functions very small. I would find ways to use fewer variables. Instead of 'for(int i = 0; i < max; i++)' I would use 'while(--max >= 0)', anything to avoid moving my cursor to the top of the function.
On the other hand I miss C++'s exceptions. Checking for errors all over the place gets ugly and bloats the codebase. What would otherwise be a two line copy operation between two objects gets two if blocks added which handle the miniscule chance of memory allocation failure in some other deeper frame.