Maxime Coste wrote: > That last one is by far the most interesting, Bartos being very familliar with > C++. Note that its not C that is advocated, but haskell...
I would advocate functional languages (not necessarily Haskell) over C++ any day - although implementations of functional languages have this far disappointed me slightly. I'm hoping a good multi paradigm language will appear some day. On 17 September 2014 06:57, Markus Teich <markus.te...@stusta.mhn.de> wrote: > Maxime Coste wrote: >> That is the complaint I mostly hear about Go, the lack of Generic. That and >> garbage collection. > > Why would I want to apply the same algorithm to semantically different > arguments? Appart from different kinds of number representations no useful > example comes to mind. That is a good point; I think the current purpose of generics in other languages is to enforce type checking and provide implicit pointer conversion (for example in C if you had a data structure/algorithm that took in a generic type argument as a pointer). These are conveniences, and not necessities. However, there is one more valid use in the case of a generic algorithm/data structure. Imagine you have subroutines/functions that relate to your data structure and you want to add an item. Generics allow you to write one piece of code to deal with all types and let you pass the items *by value* rather than *by reference*. This would be useful when your item data type is small so it can be optimised by the compiler. It's not like this can't be done in C, you can use X-Macros [1] to do this (I realised after writing this example). I guess, it's arguably less elegant. For more syntactic sugar, _Generic from C11 would work, but is not necessary. On a more constructive note, I think a list of C++ paradigms that are commonly used could be compared with their C counterparts... That would make it a useful reference for suckless programmers. What are people's views on literate programming for maths heavy code? Like Maxime, operator overloading in C++ for maths code offloads the brain so you can focus more on the algorithmic detail and remember what you have done when you return to the code after a long time (or if someone else has to read it). I think, however, literate programming using LaTeX would allow the same degree of expression and probably be even better for readability. I realise suckless code doesn't tend to make use of literate programming often, particularly because the code is relatively simple, memory management patterns which C programmers would have seen countless times over, but for complicated and novel algorithms, different thought patterns are necessary. C++ provides error-checking facilities that C does not possess. However, I think these are rather limited in scope. I would rather go for verification proofs [2]. Although C is good enough for most of us, I can't help but wonder if ideas from Forth, Haskell, Lisp, Alef (and so on) could somehow provide a clean systems language without feature bloat. For instance in C (yes C), I can immediately think of 6 different recursive mechanisms/keywords... is that many necessary??? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Macro [2] http://frama-c.com/ Cheers -- Tai Chi Minh Ralph Eastwood tcmreastw...@gmail.com
