Re: Why C++ is successful

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Jeffrey said

<<Partly, but Fortran also has the advantage of lacking pointers.  The fact
that C/C++ allow you to modify a variable through pointers in non-obvious
ways put real limits on what sort of optimizations the compiler can safely
make.  Fortran back when I used it was also strictly a static language
i.e., all local variables were, in C terms, statically allocated, out
of BSS, not allocated off the stack on function entry, and all arguments
were pass-by-reference.  This made function entry and exit much faster.
(no stack frames to release, no copying of pass-by-value arguments, etc.)
Of course, this also meant no recursive function calls.
>>

This is old fashioned thinking, on modern processors, the normal situation
is that accessing static global memory is more expensive than accessing
local stack storage. 

Note incidentally that Fortran is carefully designed to give the implementor
the choice between using static and stack storage (i.e. the characterization
of "strictly static" applies to the *implementation* not the *language*)

It is also not at all the case that passing by reference is necessarily
faster than passing by copy, and many Fortran compilers use pass by 
copy for simple variables.