Re: Boost process and C

Ben Pfaff wrote:
jacob navia <jacob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Ben Pfaff a icrit :
websnarf@xxxxxxxxx writes:
You are saying you should throw out an entire language because you
don't like the way it handles strings?
It depends on your priorities. I wouldn't want to rewrite a Perl
program that does complex string processing in C. It's going to
get a lot longer and possibly harder to read (depending on how
much taste the Perl programmer had).

You mean then in substance:

"Since C strings are completely screwed up, do NOT try to change that,
but learn Perl".

No. I mean that some string operations can be expressed shorter
and with more clarity in Perl than in C. No new string library will change
this.

That's a pretty wishy washy premise on which to base an implied
disapproval of Bstrlib. Let me just guess that you haven't really
seriously taken a look at it.

Bstrlib + PCRE is virtually functionally equal to Perl. And of course,
since its C, it can support reference based sub-strings, and users have
compile time type safety assistance. If you use the C++ interface
(CBStrings) you will have comparable syntactical brevity to Perl.

If you want to actually change the C language to improve its
string support, as you seem to want, that's completely separate.
But your changes to C won't affect my software for 10 years or
more, because that's at least how long it'll take for them to get
into the standard (assuming they ever do) and then make it into
a wide range of real-world implementations.

Yes, but this criticism applies, at the very least, to the entire C99
standard as well; which is apparently not off topic in this news group.
Except that more likely, there is *no* amount of time that you will be
able to wait to be able to assume C99 compliance in most available C
compilers.

--
Paul Hsieh
http://www.pobox.com/~qed/
http://bstring.sf.net/

.

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