Rhodri James <rho...@kynesim.co.uk>: > C++ is designed, true, but well designed? It has a fundamental flaw; > it wants to be both a high-level language and compatible with C, under > the mistaken impression that C is a high level language. Since C is > actually an excellent macro-assembler, this dooms the exercise from > the very start.
C++ was never compatible with C, any more than Peter Jackson's Hobbit movies were a rendition of JRR Tolkien's "Hobbit, or There and Back Again." Objective C, by contrast, was designed to be compatible with C. That's why its syntax looks so weird. > C++ lives in the no-man's land between programming languages that care > quite a lot what processor they are running on and programming > languages that wouldn't recognise hardware if it came up and bit them. C is the traditional application programming language in the Unix family. It doesn't see any hardware. It only sees function libraries and virtual memory. (Exception: recent memory barrier semantics in C force every C and C++ programmer to be acutely aware of multicore RAM cache behavior the moment you start doing multithreading or multiprocessing. To me, this looks more like a bug than a feature in the languages.) > It can be used either way, but comes with all the baggage for both. I > am yet to see a C++ program that wasn't more comprehensible when > rendered as either C or Python (or the high-level language of your > choice, I imagine). I agree. C++'s main problem is that it tries to solve the wrong problem. A C++ compiler seeks to make sure your program doesn't have bugs. That noble (but futile) goal makes it painful to program in C++. Python and C don't try to protect you. In return, you get syntactic convenience that probably enhances the quality of your programs. Marko -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
