Re: Java Risks (Was: Ada News Brief - 96-05-24

[cspw@cs.ru.ac.za (Peter Wentworth)]

In <4ov36b$1665@watnews1.watson.ibm.com> ncohen@watson.ibm.com (Norman H. Cohen) writes:

>In article <Pine.GSO.3.92.960602134300.12386C-100000@nunic.nu.edu>,
>Richard Riehle <rriehle@nunic.nu.edu> writes: 

>|>    There are aspects of C++ that, as orginally  conceived by Dr.
>|>    Stroustrup, make very good sense.  The fundamental idea of
>|>    expanding the stuct into a class was a stroke of brilliance.

>I disagree.  It is the confusion of classes and structs (along with the
>confusion of class-as-type-definition and class-as-module) that leads to
>absurdities such as the following: 

...

With natural languages I've never had too much concern that it might
be possible to construct ambiguous or difficult-to-understand absurdities.
I don't assess the quality of a violin on the basis that some hacker
might be able to make it sound bad by getting poor interaction between
the bow and two or more strings...

But there is a pervasive idea among many Computer Scientists that 
seems to assess the quality of a language in terms of whether 
they can find some interesting way to abuse it.  This particular
"evaluation paradigm" (and the usual text-book stuff of orthogonality
of base concepts, etc.) isn't necessarily God-given, written-in-concrete,
the one-and-only-true-way.

I think the C++ critics would get a much better hearing, at least from
me, if they tried to explain about those things they were not able to do 
cleanly or elegantly (and there are probably many!).  Anybody can write 
rubbish in any language.  So what? 

Peter
--
EP Wentworth - Dept. of Comp. Sci. - Rhodes University - Grahamstown - RSA.
cspw@cs.ru.ac.za               "If you come to a fork in the road, take it."
fax: +27 461 311915                                              Yogi Bear