Re: Safe C++

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On Wed, 19 Sep 2001, Chad R. Meiners wrote:
> "Brian Rogoff" <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> wrote in message
> > Pattern matching
> > Parametrically polymorphic functions
> > Tuples
>
> I'll have to trust you or these three since I have never encountered a
> situation where I was ever wishing for such functionality.

I used and liked Ada, compared with C, but there aren't too many things
about Ada (overloading is the big one) I miss compared with ML.

About the only thing I can do is suggest that you learn some modern
functional language, so you'll at least have a basis to compare. Nope,
I don't feel like writing a long enough description of why they're good;
it's been done many times, if you have the patience to read a long posting
you should have the patience to read "Why Functional Programming Matters"
by Hughes or "Critique of Standard ML" by Appel. My pet language is OCaml,
which is an ML but not the (obsolete) version of SML crtitiqued by Appel.

-- Brian