On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 02:51:34PM -0500, william moss wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA256 > > On 02/12/2015 01:42 PM, Hendrik Boom wrote: > > On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 11:25:46AM +0100, Didier Kryn wrote: > > ... > >> > >> I have been programming in C > >> from the beginning of the 80's and loved it, but I think C++ is > >> wrong by design (personal thought), although I have no choice but to > >> use programs written in that language, as well as Perl, Python and > >> Ruby, which I have no opinion about. > > > > I share your opinion about C++. I too used to use C, since the > > mid-seventies. Except for its abysmal identification of array > > subscripting with pointer arithmetic, it's a very clean assembler > > replacement. > > > > C++'s marketing success was to be compatible with C. It no longer is, > > though. And C++'s complelxity is too much for me.
It's no tthat I can't figure out what C++ does -- I once wrote most of a C++ parser and sesmantic checker -- but it gets in the way of understanding my program. > > > > I occasionally use C++'s objects. But for the most part, I try to > > write my C code so it indifferently compiles under C++ or C. Yes, > > if means some #if's. But C++ statically catches some errors that C > > doesn't. > > > > I strongly suspect that most of the code nowadays written in C++ could > > better have been written in Modula 3. The kind of guaranteed instant > > response you can in principle get without garbage-collection pauses are > > not needed for almost all software. > > > > But I'd appreciate a more compact syntax for Modula 3, while retaining > > its semantics. > > > > -- hendrik > > _______________________________________________ > > Dng mailing list > > Dng@lists.dyne.org > > https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng > > > > C++, originally C with Classes, was a great idea. It added Smalltalk > like abstractions to data and bound data to methods. This is long in the > past and I no longer use C++. C, in its ANSI/POSIX/ISO incarnation is > quite good. Modern C has removed some of its FORTRAN roots and fixed > many of the K&R foibles. > > Pointer arithmetic is what C is all about. The original manual and the > Programmer's Workbench both call it a portable assembler. Yes. I understand pointer arithmeetic, and like to use it. THe trouble is I don't normally want the integers I'm adding to a pointer scaled by what the pointer points to. C already has a useful subscript operation that does that. It gets really awkward to use tricky memory layouts. All the casts to void* and back make the code unreadable. > > There are no arrays in C, there is a memory region that is addressed by > a reference. Pascal and its derivatives (Modula, Ada) do implement real > arrays as does PL/I. > > For scripts, I use byte code languages (Perl mostly these days) with > some low level modules written in ANSI C. I do however, miss using > FORTH, CLOS and Smalltalk for real applications. The traditional implementation of FORTH gets really bulky on a 64-bit machine. All those huge addresses! It's why I implement my concatenative languages with bytecodes. > Most applications that are not critical to latency or 6 sigma > predictability are best served with a byte code language. I can see why it could affect latency. But predicatability? > This places > the burden of reliability on the developers of the run time (byte code > machine). That said, I have probably written as much code in various > assembly languages as in C. > > I have been using Unix and its analogs for 37 years, computers for > engineering for 51 years. My first programs were written in FORTRAN-4, > using a model 19 key punch. I used an earlier version of Fortran. Fortran 4 hadn't been invented yet. -- hendrik _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
