🚀 go-pugleaf

"Adrian" <aa@aa.aa> wrote in message news:<89603$4146b71a$3e15a474$31571@freeler.nl>...
[SNIP]
> Alwyn wrote:
> > An interesting point of view. It's like saying that C++ takes C one
> > evolutionary step further. But it isn't true: C++ is a wholly new
> > language,
> That is not what Stroustrup said. See his Preface
> to the First Edition. He calls it a "superset" of C :)

That's not really true; there are plenty of valid C programs that are
invalid C++ programs (without even being intentionally obtuse--the
_preferred_ way of writing some programs in C won't compile at all in
C++), and there are plenty of cases where the same program will
compile in both C and C++ but behave quite differently.  (Assuming C++
and C to mean "ANSI C++" and "ANSI C89"; if you include C99 in the mix
things get even more disjoint).

It's also not really a useful statement and is somewhat misleading
since it seems to make a value judgement that C++ is better than C
because it has more features.  Not all features are necessarily
beneficial, and indeed one of the biggest complaints some people have
about C++ is that the language itself is "too big" in ways that
encourage writing bad code.  (which is something of the same argument
as the Perl "More than one way to do it" philosophy vs. the Python
"There should be exactly one obvious way to do it" philosophy.)

And in reality, adding features like those in C++ does make it a
different language.  People writing in C++ tend to attack problems
differently than people writing in C.  Of course it is possible to
write C-style programs in C++, but you can also do so in Java.