Re: Fun with C

["George P." <george.priv@gmail.com>]

On Apr 18, 10:06 pm, Elias Salomão Helou Neto <eshn...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Apr 18, 10:22 pm, "George P." <george.p...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
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> > Oh really? So C is the language of cyborgs that never have bad days,
> > never argue with their girlfriends and never go late night drinking?
> > And sure none of such people should be allowed to design embedded
> > systems :-)
>
> No, not cyborgs, it is the language of nerds. They don't drink and
> about girlfriends, you've gotta be kidding! Also all of their days are
> bad, so they're used to it.
> :-)
>
> Now, seriously, what I meant is that bashing C without knowing the
> basics doesn't make anyone look smart. It is quite the opposite. And I
> repeat, whining is not the way to go here. Yes, C is dangerous, unsafe
> and difficult to master, but let us be men and use it well if
> required.
>
> I believe making assumptions about language behavior is danger. There
> are historical reasons why C is the way it is. Some of them were
> wrong, now we know, but it won't change - mainly because of the huge
> codebase. So, let's have fun with C, why not? I have fun with C, C++,
> TeX, Lisp, Pascal, Matlab, etc. Right now I am trying to find time to
> study Ada - more fun! I am sure I will share you guys' view about how
> Ada is good and safe, but it is really unlikely that I am going to
> become such a sissy and fill this newsgroups with foolish complaints.
>
> And as a side note, even sober, I have recently written a heavily
> templated C++ ray tracer which I instantiated with unsigneds as
> indices and signeds as difference types. There was a mixed expression
> that gave me some trouble, and I do understand the problem people
> mention in this thread. What I do not understand is how people can
> show pride in not knowing the language! And I can't see me whining
> that much because of something that won't (because it can't) change -
> the C language.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

I thought you was the first accusing incompetence here.  I respect
your talents in mastering so many languages, but for many of us
languages are just tools to solve problems. Thinking of the problem is
hard enough. Thus, combing throuh code trying to figure out what
compiler will do is just ectra distruction.  I understand very well
that C is sort of F1 racing car.  It's all good, but if you are in
freight business investing in F1 car is of questionable value (except
for promotion).  For those of us who is in commercial application
development cost/value becomes of importance.  What we are getting in
costs?  Special bread of coders, lengthy development cycle (you
admitted yourself your excapade with templates), possibility of having
sleeping bugs.
Now what will be the value? 10-20% performance?

Sometime we are forced to use languages by hardware vendors...

G.