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- Path: galaxy.ucr.edu!not-for-mail
- From: thp@cs.ucr.edu (Tom Payne)
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++
- Subject: Re: C/C++ knocks the crap out of Ada
- Followup-To: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++
- Date: 23 Feb 1996 20:12:10 GMT
- Organization: University of California, Riverside Department of Computer Science
- Message-ID: <4gl72q$mo9@galaxy.ucr.edu>
- References: <00001a73+00002504@msn.com> <4etcmm$lpd@nova.dimensional.com> <312515DF.7D3B@cmlj.demon.co.uk> <4gad29$ddp@druid.borland.com>
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-
- Pete Becker (pete@borland.com) wrote:
- : In article <312515DF.7D3B@cmlj.demon.co.uk>, chris@cmlj.demon.co.uk says...
- : >
- : >With regards to maintenance, there's many people out there who consider
- : >C/C++ a Write only language.
- :
- : How many of the people who say this have actually used C++ enough to
- : understand it? I know it's popular today to dump on C++, but my experience has
- : been that most of the people who produce one-liners like this simply don't
- : know what they're talking about. If relying on that sort of ignorance is the
- [...]
-
-
- Let's not blame the victim! It is hardly "ignorance" or lack of
- familiarity that leads programmers to conclude that C/C++ is difficult
- to read and to express that judgement in the hyperbole, "write-only
- language."
-
- C++ has been amazingly successful in achieving its design goals, thus
- assuring continued C/C++ dominance in the market. As with the 80386
- extention to the 80286 instruction set, however, the resulting
- language is far from elegant. We are talking about a language whose
- syntax is so convoluted that, Dan Saks devoted over a hundred column
- inches of the January issue of C/C++ Users Journal to telling
- professional C/C++ programmers how to parse declarations. In the same
- issue, Pete Becker devoted space to explaining the meaning of
- sizeof(Sample&), which reads, "the number of bytes in the object
- representation for the type reference-to-Sample." That value turns
- out to be (get this!) the number of bytes used to encode objects of
- type Sample, regardless of the number of bytes used to encode
- references --- a design decision so obscure and irregular that even
- the authors of the April Draft of the C++ standard missed it.
-
- Tom Payne (thp@cs.ucr.edu)
-
- P.S. My students say that C is an in-joke that everyone now knows,
- while C++ is a shaggy dog whose punch line is STL.
-