From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 109fba,df854b5838c3e14 X-Google-Attributes: gid109fba,public X-Google-Thread: 1014db,df854b5838c3e14 X-Google-Attributes: gid1014db,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,df854b5838c3e14 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: thp@cs.ucr.edu (Tom Payne) Subject: Re: C/C++ knocks the crap out of Ada Date: 1996/02/23 Message-ID: <4gl72q$mo9@galaxy.ucr.edu>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 140846330 references: <00001a73+00002504@msn.com> <4etcmm$lpd@nova.dimensional.com> <312515DF.7D3B@cmlj.demon.co.uk> <4gad29$ddp@druid.borland.com> followup-to: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++ organization: University of California, Riverside Department of Computer Science newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++ Date: 1996-02-23T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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." 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. 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.