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From: Peter J. Holzer on 11 Mar 2010 18:18 On 2010-03-10 21:22, J�rgen Exner <jurgenex(a)hotmail.com> wrote: > John Bokma <john(a)castleamber.com> wrote: >>J�rgen Exner <jurgenex(a)hotmail.com> writes: >>> ccc31807 <cartercc(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>>>This isn't harder than C pointers. >>> >>> Saying something isn't harder than C pointers is like saying a desease >>> isn't worse than the Bubonic plague: it gives very little comfort to >>> people suffering from it. >>> Actually C pointers are probably among the worst concepts ever invented >>> in computer science. >> >>They are not "invented" they are somewhat a 1:1 mapping to >>assembly. > > Exactly. You can hardly do worse than that ;-) > > But in all fairness, when C was developed in the early 70s it was a > major step forward and Kerningham and Ritchie could not possibly have > known as much as we do today. That and they had to fit the compiler into 64k of memory. And it had to finish in a reasonable time on a PDP-11. That somewhat limits what you can do even if you know how to write a better language in theory. (I do remember the MFII COBOL compiler on an 8086 - compiling our program took half an hour) > For its time it was a great concept and > implementation. It's just that it is way outdated 40 years later. Yup. >>I do agree, however, that it would've been nice if C had references like >>Perl, and (harder to get to) pointers as they are now. > > Or even Pascal or Modula or Haskell or pick pretty much any more modern > language. Pascal is older than C. And its pointers are (were?) particularly useless. Modula-2 was actually quite nice. One can see that Wirth used it to write real code and not just for teaching :-). hp
From: Tim Bradshaw on 11 Mar 2010 18:54 On 2010-03-11 18:24:32 +0000, Ron Garret said: > C++ is clearly > harder to learn than, say, Scheme, and yet I'm pretty sure that more > people know C++ than know Scheme. On what basis is it then harder to learn? I think you may be confusing "has a small definition" with "is easy to learn". That would make, say, general relativity, something that is very easy to learn (much easier than being able to cook competently, say), but I don't think that is true.
From: Tim Bradshaw on 11 Mar 2010 19:01 On 2010-03-11 22:28:40 +0000, Peter J. Holzer said: > [Ron wrote] >> It violates universally accepted conventions >> about what, for example, double quotes mean. For example, this: >> >> print "The widget costs $12.75."; >> >> The actual behavior of that code snippet is not justifiable under any >> sane language semantics. > > "Universally accepted" is rather strong given that most shells, most > templating languages and many scripting languages use a similar > expansion mechanism. I think this is close to the core of this argument. It seems to me that for people who don't come from a Unix background, then various things about Perl might just seem impossibly weird. But for people who do come from that background, many of Perl's constructs - such as the way double-quoted strings work - seem like naturual rationalisations of the way these things work in other tools, specifically the shells and awk / sed. May be Ron has never used these tools, I'm not sure.
From: Pascal J. Bourguignon on 11 Mar 2010 19:39 Tim Bradshaw <tfb(a)tfeb.org> writes: > On 2010-03-11 22:28:40 +0000, Peter J. Holzer said: > >> [Ron wrote] >>> It violates universally accepted conventions >>> about what, for example, double quotes mean. For example, this: >>> >>> print "The widget costs $12.75."; >>> >>> The actual behavior of that code snippet is not justifiable under any >>> sane language semantics. >> >> "Universally accepted" is rather strong given that most shells, most >> templating languages and many scripting languages use a similar >> expansion mechanism. > > I think this is close to the core of this argument. It seems to me > that for people who don't come from a Unix background, then various > things about Perl might just seem impossibly weird. But for people > who do come from that background, many of Perl's constructs - such as > the way double-quoted strings work - seem like naturual > rationalisations of the way these things work in other tools, > specifically the shells and awk / sed. May be Ron has never used these > tools, I'm not sure. "Rationalization" and "handling of double-quotes in unix shells" in the same sentence? -- __Pascal Bourguignon__
From: John Bokma on 11 Mar 2010 21:14
"Peter J. Holzer" <hjp-usenet2(a)hjp.at> writes: > On 2010-03-10 20:54, John Bokma <john(a)castleamber.com> wrote: [..] > I started with BASIC (think early 1980's here - line numbers and > goto), ZX Spectrum, 1983 here > then did a little bit of Pascal and assembly (6502 and Z80) before More or less same here, Z80, Comal, Pascal, 6800, 6809, 68000 ... >> I do agree, however, that it would've been nice if C had references like >> Perl, and (harder to get to) pointers as they are now. > > Actually, C pointers are quite ok in theory (for example, you can't make > a pointer into an array point outside of the array (except "just after" > it). How does C prevent this? Or I don't understand what a pointer into an array is. -- John Bokma j3b Hacking & Hiking in Mexico - http://johnbokma.com/ http://castleamber.com/ - Perl & Python Development |