Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1407

David Wagner ... snip ...

Most of the time the code shouldn't care about 9 vs 8 bit bytes etc. It will be reading strings and integers etc. from streams, manipulating them, and writing them to streams. But once in a while something else comes up where byte love and or size matters. If the programmer never heard of these things he will use the unwarrented buttumptions. Otherwise he may handle it by simply commenting "this won't work under such and so conditions", or even use the #if .... #error mechanism.

As a concrete example, I just advised someone who wanted to collect statistics on char use to form:

static unsigned long countsUCHARMAX + 1;* autozeroed * int ch;

and process the data with: while (EOF != (ch = getc(f))) countsch++;

which still has the hidden buttumption that no character will occur more than ULONGMAX times. But it has ensured that the index will never be out of range, which using an array of 256 entries would not. The cost was zero.

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