Re: Rephrase - Could you sod off Spinoza

In article <dbb898d2-f447-4c10-af37-d455a8c19057@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@xxxxxxxxx> writes
So? C is a programming langauge. Get over it.

Typical programmer logic, often reflected in bugs: if p->q then p==q.
Here p is the assertion that "C is a programming language" and q is
the assertion that "this news group is about programming": from q is
inferred invalidly that "we need only cover C".

You're the one who introduced the "only" bit. That's inventing a strawman, otherwise known as non-collegiate intellectual dishonesty.

Because C IS a
programming language, we can certainly talk about it here.

Correct.

But it
seems to be the only language that Richard or Randy know (even though
they err in its usage), therefore they squelch conversations about
other languages by means of character assassination.

I don't see them squelching conversations about C++ or Quan.

This is comp.programming. It covers _ALL_ progarmming. There is no
requirement that modern approaches or object-oriented is covered _ONLY_.

Wow: such logic. I'm not asking for OO only.

But you seem to be asking for no C. Or nothing that might suggest that your blinkered view of C is wrong.

You need more real-world experience. In the real world, existing C
programs written for older and noncompliant compilers are never
recompiled using new compilers,

Wrong.

and the old compilers are retained to
compile the legacy code, because owing to Clive et al.'s hard work and
the lack of static nesting in C, the legacy code needs to be
completely reviewed, line by line, by a Fat *** before it can use
the compliant compiler.

Any time you change environments you need to check for changes. That applies equally in other languages.

In any case, support for existing code was an explicit goal of the C90 Standard (not my hard work, because it was before my time, old boy). Most of the awkward bits in there are precisely to allow existing code to continue to work unchanged. [If that wasn't a goal, lots of stuff would have been different. No functions without prototypes, for example.]

[...]
Well the criticism _IS_ deserved.

Quite a lot of assertions, all centering around people. Off topic, of
course.
[...]
Schildt's problems are caused by the fact that the poor design of C
makes fools out of good people,

out of fools, actually

as in the case of Nuls and undefined
behavior in cases, like memcpy(), where the designers and the
committees were too lazy and frightened to think hard. It appears to
me that Ritchie rejected length codes for strings just because IBM
used them in PL.I, and this was childish thinking that pretends that a
subset of computer technicians, who were just as much a part of the
military-industrial complex as was IBM, could differentiate themselves
with stylistic clues such as stupid beards, and a deliberate choice
not to follow IBM's length code lead.

It also appears to me that the C design team failed to notice that
"moving non-overlapping strings" needs to be treated as a special case
of "moving strings which may overlap", because they lacked Dijkstra's
combination of mathematical maturity and compassion for people who are
trying to use computers to solve real-world problems governed by
Murphy's law.

Then, Clive and his friends "standardized" this ***, and the trouble
really began.

Quite a lot of assertions, all centering around people. Off topic and completely wrong, of course.

--
Clive D.W. Feather | Home: <clive@xxxxxxxxxx>
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