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- Path: news.interpath.net!mercury!softbase
- From: softbase@mercury.interpath.net (Scott McMahan - Softbase Systems)
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
- Subject: Re: Beware of "C" Hackers -- A rebuttal to Bertrand Meyer
- Date: 14 Mar 1996 00:51:01 GMT
- Organization: Interpath -- Providing Internet access to North Carolina
- Message-ID: <4i7qhm$m94@news.interpath.net>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: mercury.interpath.com
- X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
-
- Jay Martin wrote:
- : > Rabid worship of C increases the probabilty the person is a hacker.
-
- Is this thread STILL going on? It's like GO TO Considered Harmful --
- hasn't everything bad about C already been said?
-
- : > (1) C makes low level code extremely easy to create and the C culture
- : > says that low level code is cool.
-
- The big problem is, there's a LOT of low-level code out there to be
- written. For every big, modular, well-designed Ada/COBOL/Modula-2 huge
- system, someone is writing 10-20 libraries in C to do stuff the big
- languages can't handle easily.
-
- C has some benefits over writing assembler code. It's kind of portable,
- more portable than asm code written in the mnemonics of a particular
- assembler for a particular processor. *Programmers* are more portable
- -- so what if I know 80386 assembler, and have to write the same kind
- of routine on an MVS 370 mainframe? A C programmer could exist on both
- platforms, and have a lot less learning to do between them than an
- assembler programmer. You also get lots of benefits like using
- identifiers instead of offsets, a huge memory manipulation library,
- high-level bitwise operators that make bit flipping look like math
- instead of an instruction set, and so on. Anyway, people use C because
- it is helpful in doing things that are machine-level but portable
- across many different machines and OSes because most computers are very
- similar now in terms of byte and word size and stuff.
-
- If I have a high-level project, I'd consider using Delphi or perl to
- build a user interface or grind through files. But if I'm doing
- something low level, I like C. A lot of the stuff I do is very low
- level, or requires low-level control over what's going on.
-
- I'm not saying C is perfect -- I think C and C++ are BAD choices
- to write Windows programs in, for example, because it's a case
- of trying to fit Windows to the C language than any real
- benefit C gives.
-
- Scott
-