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- Path: mail2news.demon.co.uk!wildcard.demon.co.uk
- From: Cyber Surfer <cyber_surfer@wildcard.demon.co.uk>
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.c++
- Subject: Re: Why garbage collection?
- Date: Wed, 31 Jan 96 08:59:20 GMT
- Organization: The Wildcard Killer Butterfly Breeding Ground
- Message-ID: <823078760snz@wildcard.demon.co.uk>
- References: <4ecmfo$as9@news2.ios.com> <4ei4og$la1@info.epfl.ch> <s08spgxh3r1.fsf@lox.ICSI.Berkeley.EDU>
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- In article <s08spgxh3r1.fsf@lox.ICSI.Berkeley.EDU>
- marcoxa@lox.icsi.berkeley.edu "Marco Antoniotti" writes:
-
- > Of course (this time seriously), I cannot contest Bjarne's account of
- > the history of C++ and the motivations that lead him to the choices
- > he made. To my partial justification I can only say that the earliest
- > document of Bjarne's on C++ that was widely available dates to 1983
- > ("Adding Classes to C..." SW Practice and Experience" 13), and that I
- > doubt that many people actually saw the AT&T C++ preprocessor until
- > 87/88 (I might, of course, be wrong on this.) Of course not many
- > people had a Xerox or a Symbolics to play around either.
-
- Has this changed recently? I don't think so. Most people still think
- I'm strange for wanting to use Lisp, and some find it hard to believe
- that it can be used for a machine with 32 MB of RAM and running NT.
- If that kind of machine _can't_ run Lisp, what can? Well, it's a
- matter of perception, as it _can_ run Lisp, even a fairly large Lisp
- like Allegro CL for Windows. However, very few people know this.
-
- I doubt that many non-Lisp programmers/users have even heard of
- Symbolics, never mind used one. The numbers will be insignificant
- compared to the vast hordes of people who think that Lisp is dead.
- C++ is very much alive and kicking, and a great many people know it.
-
- If you made a reference to CFRONT above, then I think you may have
- made a mistake. My understanding is that it is a _compiler_. It may
- well produce C code, but there are Lisp to C compilers that do the
- same thing, but they're not preprocessors either. My understanding
- of Ratfor is that it was only "interested" 10% of the code that ran
- thru it, so I'll feel safe calling it a preprocessor. If it was
- "interested" in 100% of the code, then I'd call it a compiler.
-
- > What I find very interesting in Bjarne's post is the reference to
- > Simula. I never programmed in it and have only memories of the
- > chapters on Ghezzi's book (1st edition). It would seem that my
- > accusation of inventing a "newspeak" must then fall on the
- > Smalltalk/Loops/Flavors people. :)
-
- Another case of "not invented here", I think. ;-) Perhaps we should
- first define what we mean by the word "compiler", but we probably
- all know what we mean by it...don't we? I dunno.
-
- We could just be arguing over fine points that most programmers don't
- have time for, never mind care about. They could be the people using
- C++, coz it's there, and everybody knows it. Sometimes the only factor
- that counts is the cost ("Lisp programmers know the value of everything,
- and the cost of nothing", in which case, "C++ programmers know the
- cost of everything, and the value of nothing"), and a typical C++
- development system will cost about $300.
-
- So, it's there and its dirt cheap. No wonder so many people use it.
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