Re: c / c++ : is it end of era ?

jacob navia said:

Mark McIntyre a écrit :
On Thu, 28 Dec 2006 11:08:48 +0100, in comp.lang.c , jacob navia
<jacob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<snip>

You can't use [C] without cutting yourself the hand.


if someone is incompetent, undertrained or lazy, sure. The same
argument can be applied to cars, toasters and pencil sharpeners by the
way.

Yes sure. Anything that improves security and allows for
less error prone interfaces is doomed to fail in this atmosphere
of "macho" programming.

Not at all. The point you are missing is that there is more to programming
than "making it as easy as possible". Programming languages have various
characteristics, of which "ease of use" is only one. Others include
performance, portability, flexibility, expressive power, and simplicity (a
non-exhaustive list).

All of these characteristics are desirable, and programming languages
possess them in varying degrees. Sometimes, you can't increase one without
decreasing one or more of the others.

Programming language designers make choices which (whether they realise it
or not) enhance their language's "score" (to put it crudely) on some of
these characteristics but diminish it in others. Would that it were
possible to crank all of them up to the max! But it isn't.

And so we make trade-offs.

You appear to wish to promote one particular characteristic - ease of use -
without regard to the effect that such promotion will have on various other
characteristics. That's your choice, if you're implementing your own
language (or indeed if you are implementing extensions to C), but please
don't make the mistake of thinking that your choices should be binding on
everyone else just because *you* think they're good choices.

It is pointless to discuss this. You never make mistakes
and those that do are "incompetent, undertrained, and lazy".

It may indeed be pointless to discuss this with you, at least, because you
seem to be very ready to jump to conclusions that have little or no basis
in fact. Nobody in this discussion has claimed that they never make
mistakes, or that those who do are incompetent, undertrained, and lazy.

--
Richard Heathfield
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29/7/1999
http://www.cpax.org.uk
email: rjh at the above domain, - www.
.

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