In article <9kae23$38a$1@news-central.tiac.net>, "David Starner" writes: > Darren New wrote in message > news:3B659726.33E301CA@san.rr.com... >>> �Don't use C; In my opinion, C is a library programming language >>> not an app programming language.� - Owen Taylor (GTK+ developer) >> >> C is a sucky library programming language as well. Less sucky than a lot >> of other things, but the lack of any sort of first-class non-primitive >> data really bites for library development. (I.e., the fact that you >> can't return a string is quite a hinderance to most of the libraries I >> tend to write.) > > But it has the huge advantage of having the stablest, standardist binary API I am not at all convinced that most standard goes with most stable. You should add some proof. > on most systems, and being useable from almost every programming language in > active use. Often, the only safe way to connect to systems in the same > language compiled by different compilers is through a C interface. And "often" operating systems come from Microsoft. Ada also has standardized interfaces to Fortran and Cobol. But on VMS there is a common calling standard for all languages. I don't mean to slight any other operating systems that are language-neutral, but the idea that interfaces between languages might use null-terminated strings is like passing the cup around to make sure _everybody_ gets typhoid. Pointer arithmetic is the wave of the past.