Re: C bug of the day

[kanze@gabi-soft.fr]

Preben Randhol <randhol+abuse@pvv.org> wrote in message
news:<slrnbeboi5.1qc.randhol+abuse@kiuk0152.chembio.ntnu.no>...
> Vinzent Hoefler wrote:
> > kanze@gabi-soft.fr wrote:

> >>  I'd rather have a language in which all of the defaults were
> >>fundamentally safe, but with the freedom to override them if you had
> >>special constraints, or even in cases where you came across a case
> >>which the language authors hadn't considered. I don't know such a
> >>language, however; it may exist somewhere, but if it does, it
> >>certainly isn't very popular or wide spread.

> > And that's been posted to comp.lang.ada? ;-)

> Yes. Only goes to show that there are a lot of people who doesn't know
> that there are better alternatives to C/C++. *sigh*

I didn't say that there weren't better languages.  I only said that
there wasn't a perfect language.

I've never actually used Ada, so I cannot say for sure, but from what
I've heard and read, it does have better defaults than C++, at least in
most cases.  I suspect that for many applications, it would be a better
choice, at least on purely technical grounds, than C++.  I suspect that
the same thing is true for a number of other languages, such as Eiffel
or Modula-3.  

But I'm not sure. My original contact with Modula-3 was 10 years ago,
and I found it beautiful. A couple of months ago, I took another look.
While much of the original elegance is still there, it did seem a bit
archa�c for some things: no multiple inheritance, no destructors, etc.
While C++ has a lot of bad points, it also has some very good points
(like destructors).  In the last ten years, I've grown very used to
these good points, and very adept at avoiding the bad points.  To the
point that if a language is missing one of the good points, it seems
somehow lacking something, even if it has corrected all of the bad
points.

One could also argue that Ada isn't very popular or wide spread.  At
least, I've never been able to get a contract where I could use it.  And
I'd really like to try it, if only to be able to speak with authority
one way or the other.

--
James Kanze             GABI Software             mailto:kanze@gabi-soft.fr
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