Re: Address and bit mask

[Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de>]

On 30.08.11 16:04, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:44:20 +0200, Georg Bauhaus wrote:
> 
>> On 30.08.11 12:58, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
>>
>>> C is a *bad* language.
>>
>> Please don't say C is a bad language.  It isn't, in many ways.
>>
>> It *does* require very good and very careful programmers;
>> alas, more of these than think of themselves as being very
>> good and very careful.  *This* is the bad thing.
> 
> I see. Murder is not bad. That something dies is bad, not the deed itself.
> This kind of logic?

No, a double edged dagger with flexible handle might be something many
find natural, good for extreme gardening maybe. If one group of programmers
have learned to like some tool, even have written a popular OS using the
tool, if Knuth uses the tool, what will they say, and think about us,
if we tell them: "Your choice of tool is bad!"  We loose, won't we?
But not on technical grounds.

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/engineering-design-problems/2009/02/impossible-objects-2-electric.html

http://vimeo.com/2234590

Per Brinch Hansen, when he explained how Java's concurrency
primitives are defective, said "bad", too.  And more things.
He found a style in his critique to the effect that the crowd ...
ignored his critique. At best.


> C is bad (worse than the language X) simply because it is less suitable for
> programming (read: software developing). Of course, C might be good (better
> than X) for anything else, but that is irrelevant.

The parentheses in particular will work a lot better if restricted
to single technical effects, I think; "software developing"
can only imply things, lots of unnamed things.