On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 11:25:46AM +0100, Didier Kryn wrote:
...
>
> I have been programming in C
> from the beginning of the 80's and loved it, but I think C++ is
> wrong by design (personal thought), although I have no choice but to
> use programs written in that language, as well as Perl, Python and
> Ruby, which I have no opinion about.

I share your opinion about C++. I too used to use C, since the
mid-seventies. Except for its abysmal identification of array
subscripting with pointer arithmetic, it's a very clean assembler
replacement.

C++'s marketing success was to be compatible with C. It no longer is,
though. And C++'s complelxity is too much for me.

I occasionally use C++'s objects. But for the most part, I try to
write my C code so it indifferently compiles under C++ or C. Yes,
if means some #if's. But C++ statically catches some errors that C
doesn't.

I strongly suspect that most of the code nowadays written in C++ could
better have been written in Modula 3. The kind of guaranteed instant
response you can in principle get without garbage-collection pauses are
not needed for almost all software.

But I'd appreciate a more compact syntax for Modula 3, while retaining
its semantics.

-- hendrik