Hi Scott your summary looks very concise and good to read. I'd like to make some minor additions,
> C can express neither exceptions nor coroutines (nor their fancy cousin, > continuations), which could be and were expressed in assembly. Nor does > C provide memory management. A few library functions give you some > primitives to roll your own, but garbage collection is out of the > question (despite Hans Boehm), because the language does not carry > enough infrastructure to find type information through introspection. So, al-imho, C 'abstracts out' some consistent 'von-Neumann' or 'Harvard-' machine from any architecture where its ported to. And that is - imho - the main strength of C. It covers well most machine code vs. C instruction mapping (~1:1), and RAM storage vs. coressponding data representation (1:1), as you said partially. It can't handle any aspect beyond these simple mappings in its language core, this is where more complex bulding blocks (libraries) will come into play. > In exchange for these losses, the C programmer can write code that > executes in response to an external signal and yet does not create a > total hash of the internal memory structures. That kind of thing is > important in an OS, and something few languages (including C++) can do. > If you intend to study C++, study C first (it is easier to grasp), as > almost everything you learn in C can be used in C++. C++ is a "big" > language, while C is a "small" one; it will take much longer to "know" > C++ even though C++ started with the goal of being "C with objects." > If you are interested in languages, reading "the Design and Evolution > of C++" is a great base; it explains how C++ got the way it is from its > initial design goals. I would say, from my own experience, that you wouldn't use all C++ features in all C++ projects. Most people I know would write C programs 'camouflaged' as C++, that is: write clean & simple C - and use some C++ features e.g, class bound methods for interfaces - but no inheritance at all (use compound objects) and no exceptions (handle errors 'the olden way'). Regards M. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
