* Warren D Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com> [Apr 20. 2014 07:41]:
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And why did C++ catch on? It is an ugly huge piece of crap.
Christ! Opinions are ..., but everybody has got one.
If C++ had been introduced ab initio back in the day, it never would have caught on. It would rightly have been regarded as garbage and landed on the scrap heap with PL/I and stuff. Heck, they probably could not have even built a compiler for it. The sole reason C++ caught on was it was built on top of C and exploited the desire for backwards compatibility to the hilt.
Anyway, how about SWAP(a,b)? That is something that one does very often, but no(?) high level language provides it. That kind of thing is like a thorn in your side. It just annoys you a little each day.
std::swap() ? http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/algorithm/swap/ It doesn't get much more generic than that.
And how about this: I want some stuff to be computed at compilation time, other stuff at run time I want to control that with same-syntax language performing this control.
Ever heard of templates? Looks like you'd appreciate (gasp!) template meta programming.
(E.g. "#for" would unroll a loop at compile time, versus plain "for" is a loop done at runtime.) Again, no language I know of has this obvious idea.
That's a tall request. But there: OpenMP The proper approach is (of course!) to write programs that write programs.
And why do we get cyclic shifts of words, but not reversal, so we cannot get the dihedral group? Why? For what possible reason?
The designers of C didn't think of every possible use 30 years in the future. They should really be ashamed. I found it more astounding that the unix command line doesn't give the dihedral group. That's why there is "rotate", near bottom of the page http://jjj.de/shell/shellpage.html
I could go on and on. The level of stupidity is just appalling.
Here is what I like about every single language that is "so much cooler than C": it's written in C. And, by the way, there is a threshold in programming language criticism where "Write your own or cork it!" applies. Best, jj
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