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- Path: druid.borland.com!usenet
- From: pete@borland.com (Pete Becker)
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++
- Subject: Re: C/C++ knocks the crap out of Ada
- Date: 28 Feb 1996 16:29:26 GMT
- Organization: Borland International
- Message-ID: <4h1vt6$eks@druid.borland.com>
- References: <00001a73+00002504@msn.com> <4etcmm$lpd@nova.dimensional.com> <312515DF.7D3B@cmlj.demon.co.uk> <4gad29$ddp@druid.borland.com> <4gl72q$mo9@galaxy.ucr.edu>
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- In article <4gl72q$mo9@galaxy.ucr.edu>, thp@cs.ucr.edu says...
- >
- >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."
- >
-
- I stand by my statement: most people who make this claim do not know what they
- are talking about.
-
- >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.
- >
-
- Yes, languages need to be explained, and sometimes have subtle points. That
- does not make any particular language "write only".
-
- >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.
-
- I would hope that you are teaching them critical analysis rather than analysis
- by one-liners. Unfortunately, context-free assertions about the complexity of
- C++ are not a useful base for a serious analysis. What are the alternatives,
- and what, objectively, are the critical needs that those alternatives do not
- answer?
-
-