Re: Breaking Delphi

"James Gibbons" wrote:
I.P. Nichols wrote:
As for bashing Pascal with the "little tot" throw away, I was in fact
chastising Mr. Gibbons, the author of the posting I was responding to,
for denigrated Kernighan, Ritchie and Stroustrup by saying "C and C++
were invented by some AT&T hackers to impress their bosses and friends."
and then saying "Pascal was developed by Niklaus Wirth [...] and his
training in engineering shows through in the clear structure and syntax
of the Pascal language." thus leaving the impression that the "AT&T
hackers' are somehow of lesser ability and education than is Wirth

After reading your posting I'm faced with the dilemma of either engaging you
in a protracted series of postings on a subject neither of us know very much
about or my making this just one posting and letting it gothereafter -
which is what I'm going to do,.

It is true that many of the C++ features were added at the suggestion of
Stroustrup's fellow programmers. I remember the quote in his book but
would need to go into the office to get it. The first time I read it I got
the impression that the intent was to include everything without any
concern for possible conflicts or true usefulness.

I have before me a copy of Stroustrup's "The Design and Evolution of C++"
(1994) and it give a most detail history of how C++ came to be and I sure
don' t get the feeling that he willy-nilly added features so as to lead
someone to conclude "that the intent was to include everything without any
concern for possible conflicts or true usefulness." He is very generious
with attribution for contributors and tries to name them all. So when you
get time you may want to get out your book and revisit your claim.

Oh yes, he was working on his PhD Thesis at Cambridge when he first started
thinking about what eventualy lead to C++.

Also, C and C++ were mostly created to run telephone switches and produce
billing info so customers could be charged. Their low level abilities got
them into other areas but I don't think they were designed with these
areas in mind. Quite often something gets created and then other people
put it to use for many things it isn't designed to do. For example, C++ is
not the best string processing language.

I also have before me a copy of Kernigham and Ritchie's "The C Programming
Language" (1978) and it's second paragraph starts out with: "C was
originally designed for and implemented on the UNIX operating system on the
DEC PDP-11 by Dennis Ritchie" and ends with "C is not tied to any particular
hardware or system..."

Yes, AT&T was in the telephone business and did develop operating systems
for computers used in their operations but here again you may want to
revisit your claim that "C and C++ were mostly created to run telephone
switches and produce billing info".

Can you please explain why I should suffer when I miss a keystroke on the
following statement:

if (a=b) instead of if (a==b)

You know very well why! "=" is defined in C as an assignment operator while
"==" is defined as an equality operator and to mix-up which to use where is
what I would characterize as a common "little tots" mistake. ;-)

CO and CO++ are powerful but can easily get you into trouble. It would
have been better if CO++ would have removed some of these problems.

Better for whom, inexperienced and/or careless programmers? It should be
noted that in C# which is intended for appeal to a much wider and more
diverse audience than "hard code C" programmers, that was "fixed" by
generating a compiler error. On page 17 of K&R they explain: "Since
assignment is about twice as frequent as equality testing in typical C
programs, it's appropriate that the operator be half as long". You do know
that C has a purposefully terse syntax and appreciated for it's brevity. :-)


I saw that this guy was being bullied by a C++ snob and just couldn't keep
myself from saying so.

It's been my experience that computer language discussions often attract,
snobs, bigots, fanatics, etc but not bullies.

Please excuse my "little tot" attitude but I thought the C++ comments
would be silly enough to not be taken seriously.

I'll take your word for it but do wonder why you just repeated the same
silly arguments as factual or to use Stephen Colbert's term "truthiness".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness


.

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