Re: Why use C++?

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Tue, 16 Aug 2011 02:52:27 -0700 (PDT), Nick Keighley wrote:

> On Aug 16, 9:47�am, "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mail...@dmitry-kazakov.de>
> wrote:
>> On Tue, 16 Aug 2011 01:18:31 -0700 (PDT), Nick Keighley wrote:
> 
>>>> 2. I don't care about the platform, I care about what the program is
>>>> supposed to do. The type's properties shall be defined by the application
>>>> domain.
>>
>>> whilst this degree of abstraction is often good the ability to fiddle
>>> with representaion is also sometimes useful.
>>
>> Never. It is a strong claim, but it holds. The cases of which you believe
>> you have to handle the type's layout, are those where the *application*
>> domain is the machine hardware itself. There exist such rare cases, but
>> they represent no exception to what I said.
> 
> this reminds of the maths that states a quadratic equation always has
> two roots (solutions). Those cases where there seems to only one root
> is actaully two roots both with the same value.
> 
> You attempt to win the argument by definition engineering.

Do you have other definitions?

>>> And if we want our
>>> programs to terminate before the sun goes cold knowing about
>>> representaion is sometimes useful.
>>
>> A premature optimization does not guaranty you anything about performance,
>> in fact the opposite. Unless your claim is that a deliberate use of a wrong
>> representation (e.g. shorter than required) might result in a better
>> performance, due to malfunction.
> 
> I'm simply arguning that in the real world performance sometimes
> matters.

And the conclusion is that the required semantics need not be implemented
if that might degrade performance?

Aren't you trying to redefine the word "required"?

> This may involve getting down and dirty with the
> representaion and other (usually) implementation details.

Aren't type specification and implementation (of that specification)
different things?

"Down and dirty" means "does wrong things", or something else?

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de