Author: Gerd Isenberg
Date: 12:05:41 07/31/03
Go up one level in this thread
On July 31, 2003 at 12:46:27, Omid David Tabibi wrote:
>On July 31, 2003 at 04:17:47, Graham Laight wrote:
>
>>On July 30, 2003 at 00:00:54, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>Depends on your ultimate goal. If you are going to be a programmer, it is
>>>not the best way to go. If you program in Java for 4 years, then leave and
>>>go to work where they use C, you have a _long_ learning curve. You've never
>>>seen pointers, for example.
>>>
>>>We took a _lot_ of heat about that from companies like BellSouth.
>>
>>It sounds to me as though Java is better than C, because it prevents errors with
>>type.
>>
>>For most businesses, the most pressing requirement is to make good code
>>cost-effectively - not to make super-fast code expensively. C is clearly going
>>to take longer to write and debug if it doesn't force type compatibility.
>
>When you learn C++ (which includes C in itself), you can very easily learn Java
>later. But it doesn't work the other way round: when you get comfortable with
>Java, you simply won't grasp the bizarre way the pointers work...
I don't find C a good didactical language.
If you have two ore more dimensional arrays for instance, there is often
confusion to pass them to a procedure via pointer.
Same for character arrays:
char someNames1[][8] = {"Otto", "Heinz", "Eduard"};
char* someNames2[] = {"Otto", "Heinz", "Eduard"};
int main (void)
{
for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++)
printf("%s %s\n", someNames1[i], someNames2[i]);
printf("sizeof (someNames1) = %d\n", sizeof (someNames1));
printf("sizeof (someNames2) = %d\n", sizeof (someNames2));
return 0;
}
The reason for Bjarne Stroustrup to leave pointer in C++ was backward
compatibility:
http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq2.html#whitespace
http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq2.html#pointers-and-references
>
>In many programs Java would be a better choice than C/C++, but a programmer
>should always have the skill to write optimized code when needed.
Yes, a little assembler experience is also fine for debugging C/C++.
>
>Recently there was some initiative to replace C++ with Python as the main
>programming language in our CS department. That initiative was fortunately
>blocked, now we just have to block Java from taking over :) If it was up to me,
>I would have replaced all those Prolog/Scheme/etc courses with more
>C/C++/Assembly stuff! Why the hell should the students learn Prolog these days?!
>
>>
May be to see some other programming paradigmns...
Gerd
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