On 02/12/2015 01:42 PM, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> 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
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C++, originally C with Classes, was a great idea. It added Smalltalk
like abstractions to data and bound data to methods. This is long in the
past and I no longer use C++. C, in its ANSI/POSIX/ISO incarnation is
quite good. Modern C has removed some of its FORTRAN roots and fixed
many of the K&R foibles.

Pointer arithmetic is what C is all about. The original manual and the
Programmer's Workbench both call it a portable assembler.

There are no arrays in C, there is a memory region that is addressed by
a reference. Pascal and its derivatives (Modula, Ada) do implement real
arrays as does PL/I.

For scripts, I use byte code languages (Perl mostly these days) with
some low level modules written in ANSI C. I do however, miss using
FORTH, CLOS and Smalltalk for real applications.

Most applications that are not critical to latency or 6 sigma
predictability are best served with a byte code language. This places
the burden of reliability on the developers of the run time (byte code
machine). That said, I have probably written as much code in various
assembly languages as in C.

I have been using Unix and its analogs for 37 years, computers for
engineering for 51 years. My first programs were written in FORTRAN-4,
using a model 19 key punch.