On Sun, Dec 03, 2000 at 10:12:06PM -0700, Jason Gunthorpe wrote: > > => Chasing C back to the systems programming niche from whence it came. <= > > Yes, well, this isn't all so cut and dry. > > I strongly suspect that a novice programmer is less likely to make a huge > mess of a project in C than in a more complex language like C++ or Perl. > (Python and others seem to make this hard, but I wonder how much that is > lack of usage..) > > How many worthwhile projects sit on the shelf because the code for the > current version is good enough to solve the problem, but so horrible that > changing it in generally infeasable (the cost of making changes is on the > order of rewriting it time wise) due to poor implementation? Comparing C to Ada (because that's what I'm familar with), I think some of the problems with horrible C code are amorilated by Ada. In specific, trading a prepocessor for a true package structure is a huge win. Killing macros entirely for inline procedures and generics is another great improvement in readibilty. You can't put two procedures in a file without nesting one or making a package. While Ada isn't garbage collected, because of how it treats arrays, there's a lot less need for the memory management. I think as much as a programming language can, Ada (and probably Java and Eiffel and Modula-3 and other languages) help discourage huge messes and encourage structed programs. -- David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org http://dvdeug.dhis.org Looking for a Debian developer in the Stillwater, Oklahoma area to sign my GPG key
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