Re: C bug of the day

[kanze@gabi-soft.fr]

James Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@att.net> wrote in message
news:<Xns9398C982B7580jimmaureenrogers@204.127.36.1>...
> kanze@gabi-soft.fr wrote in
> news:d6652001.0306120623.151b7fa3@posting.google.com: 

> > I don't know.  I find using my propre collections far less
> > error-prone than the STL.  No iterators becoming invalid just
> > because I happened to insert an element, for example.

> > I use the STL because it is standard, not because it is a
> > particularly good generic library.

> Maybe it is a reflection of my age, but I do not find it terribly
> difficult to create my own collections.

I agree to a point.  Before I started using C++, I regularly used hash
tables in C.  Which I rewrote each time around -- if genericity isn't a
goal, and you only have to solve the problem at hand, a hash table is
only about ten or twenty lines of code.

Never the less, I use standard components whenever possible.  Not for my
own sake -- I think I could design and write something better for my
needs than the standard library.  But for the sake of the programmer
coming after me, who knows, or should know, the standard library, but
certainly isn't familiar with my personal components.

Note that while we have been speaking here about safety, no one has
mentionned readability.  And IMHO, this is the most important single
feature of safety: a well run code review will catch many more errors
than the best compiler, but for a code review to be effective, the
readers have to be able to understand what you have written.

Not that I'd try and present this as an argument for C++:-).

> This also lets me tune performance for my current problem, instead of
> accepting a somewhat average performance from a generic
> implementation.

Most of the time, I really don't care.  I want something that gets the
job done, is correct, and is readable.  And no ordering is implied --
all three are absolutly essential.

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