Re: What's the deal with C99?
- From: Keith Thompson <kst-u@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:59:00 -0700
"Malcolm McLean" <regniztar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
"Keith Thompson" <kst-u@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
In my opinion, the best chance for the survival of C and forWe need one programming language for everything except the nichiest of
widespread support for any new standard (note that these are two
different, but related, things) is for C to remain fairly minimalist.
If that makes it a niche language, rather than the universal
programming language it seemed to be a few decades ago, that's not
necessarily a bad thing. (I'm willing to radically change this
opinion at the slightest provocation.)
Of course, what should happen it that the next standard should include
the features *I* like, but reject all other new features in the
interests of simplicity. 8-)}
niche areas. I've over twenty years programming
experience. Occasionally I have to knock up little Perl scripts. I
find myself puzzling over the Perl handbook trying to work out how to
break out of a loop, or how to sort a list of files by
suffix. Essentially Perl does these things in the same way as C, but
with tiny differences to make it look more like a Unix shell script,
or maybe just to be different to emphasise that it is not C. It's a
huge waste of time. As I said, this is someone with 20 years
experience who can't get his tool to sort files by suffix. However
useless the individual concerned, that would be unacceptable in any
other industry. You wouldn't tolerate eningeers being unable to
calculate bolt tolerances because someone had suddenly decided to use
a weird and wonderful new measuring system, or lawyers unable to read
new legislation because the Federal government had decided on
Latin. However we toleratye the same in software.
Both of these things are very straightforward in Perl, which is after
all a different language than C.
Realistically, we're a *long* way from being able to have a single
programming language for everything. Different languages have
different design philosophies; coherence of design within a language
is seen (rightly, in my opinion) as more important than syntactic
consistency across languages. Perl uses "last" rather than "break" to
break out of a loop; it goes along with "next" to quit the current
iteration and start from the top, like C's "continue". As for sorting
a list of files by suffix, the built-in "sort" operator makes that
quite straightforward, and quite similar to the way you'd do it in C
(write a comparison function that compares the two suffixes and pass
it to the built-in sort operator in Perl or the qsort() function in
C).
And if someday we do have a single universal programming language, I
somehow doubt that it's going to be C.
--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) <kst-u@xxxxxxx>
Nokia
"We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this."
-- Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, "Yes Minister"
.
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