On Wednesday 27 August 2003 12:43, Frank Gevaerts wrote: > On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 01:11:08AM -0500, Alex Malinovich wrote: > > The recent COBOL discussion has gotten me to thinking. Some languages > > seem to be very popular in some situations. C is easily the dominant > > language for most things Linux. So therein lies the question. Why, > > exactly, is C so popular? Especially in comparison to C++. I can't think > > of a single reason to use C instead of C++ for most of the coding that I > > would do. I generally only write user applications. I don't get anywhere > > near the kernel which is where I'd imagine most of the reason for using > > C comes in. Yet I see people writing 'modern' GUI applications and using > > C when I would think C++ would be a much better choice. Is there > > something that I'm missing? Something that C actually does better than > > C++ in regards to higher-level functions? > > First convince me that object oriented programming results in > maintainable and debuggable code, then convince me that C++ is a good > implementation of OO, and then I might consider C++ instead of C. (I > know not all the features of C++ are related to OO, but OO seems to be > the main selling point of C++ vs C)
I agree, but when it comes to documentation c is the absolute top. man strchr, man strlen, man strcmp, man sin, man cos it's all in the manuals but try do get a description from some of the functions from the C++ STL out of the manpage. It is hardly possible to code C++ and use the features (vector, list, queue and more of those prety things) without buying some dead trees. C is perfectly commented in the manpages, php has php.net, java has the api documentation, perl has perldoc and c++ has /dev/null (i know the first remark is that all c functions that are commented are part of of c++ and you have a piece). -- http://www.de-brauwer.be -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
