Author: Anthony Cozzie
Date: 15:38:38 08/11/04
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It appears that I need to expound a little bit on the idiocy of C++, and why it is the _worst_ language ever to walk the face of this planet, except for possibly Java and COBOL, and why people who go on and on about iterators and templates make me want to throw up. In the beginning, there was Assembler. People were very annoyed that code they wrote on one machine could not compile on another. Thus C was borne. C is basically portable assembler. You have pointers and typecasts, and that lets you do whatever you want. With a modern compiler, C is just as fast as assembler, slightly more maintainable, and very portable. Unfortunately, it is also very easy to shoot yourself in the foot with C, and doing anything is a lot of work due to all the memory management the programmer has to do, etc. Thus, people desired "High Level Languages", in which abstract mathematical descriptions could be written. My personal favorite is ML, but Haskell and Lisp are also good. The advantage here is that all code is very neat and simple, because the programmer is freed from worry about the little details. The problem is that all high level languages are _slow_, from 50% (OCAML) up to 10X (Java) slower than C. Then, we have C++, which tries to make a high level language out of a low level language. Guess what? it _doesn't work_. It is an exercise in stupidity. There are two ways to write C++: you can write it as C with a few nice syntax features to clean up your code, or you can (as you are evidently advocating) write it as an attempted high level language. The only problem with this is that you will fail miserably, because you still have to do your own memory management, etc. So you end up with the same development time as C and the same speed as a high level language. This is why languages like C++ and Java are the anus of the body of programming languages. If you want to sacrifice speed and write in Lisp, I may not agree with you, but I can at least see where you are coming from. If you want to write in HLA-attempt-C++, I can only consider you a moron. anthony
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