🚀 go-pugleaf

J_ELORAN@FINJYU.BITNET writes:
>   [...]
>
>   Long live C!

sommar@enea.UUCP(Erland Sommarskog) writes:
>
>But C is no new language. Well, may be a little younger than Fortran and
>Cobol, but not much. And they are all archaic.

Someone once said that Lady Algol was an improvement on most of her successors.
That includes C, Pascal, and Modula-2 (but not earlier versions of FORTRAN).

> [Some naive comments on why C will outlive its usefulness, including
> incorrect remarks about the relationship between Unix and C]

>Why I find C archaic? Let me just say I think that a good language
>should save you many mistakes as early as possible.

This is a noble goal.  A major problem with this is the definition of what
constitutes a 'mistake'.  Stuffing a 16 bit value into an 8 bit slot under
some circumstances may constitute an error.  Other times it may not.
Explicitly specifying what should be obvious semantically causes programs
to be verbose and tedious, both to read and to write.

Overrunning the end of an array is usually accepted as an error.  BUT,
allowing array bounds to be determined at runtime can also be an extremely
useful feature.  It allows more flexible and efficient usage of memory.
Unfortunately, detecting array overruns at compile time and allowing run time
array definition are difficult to put together, and runtime bound checks are
expensive in terms of efficiency.

Some things are almost universally recognized as big no-nos.  An example might
be using a double precision floating point value as a structure pointer.  C
doesn't allow that type of operation more than any other language.  But then,
the arguments never seem to be over that anyway.  They usually end up being
stylistic arguments (and everyone has their own opinion on what constitutes
'good' style/syntax).

Another source of criticism is features which at times may be useful, at
other times may be hazardous.  C takes a liberal view of the world.  It assumes
(sometimes rashly) that the programmer knows what s/he is doing.  The saw that
cuts the wood will also cut the hand.  We have known that for years, but we
still have saws.  (And no, I don't want to hear about how C is missing guards
that keep hands out -- the guards are there, but they must be used to be
effective.)

>It should also
>be readable, i.e. it shouldn't unnecessarily use artificial symbols.

Ah, the old verbosity argument.  Shorthand should never be used in business
because only those who know shorthand can read it.  Let's hear it for English
as a programming language.  C *is* readable to those who know C.  Now I do not
argue that C cannot be made unreadable, but then, so can APL, Lisp, Modula-2,
Pascal, and FORTRAN.  I will be the first to agree that some operators in C
are a bit strange, and frankly I don't know how to use them.  But every time
I try to include a particular op in a list of indefensible operators, someone
shows me a case I hadn't thought of in which it is indispensible, or at least
very useful.

>Modern languages, but still in the 3rd generation, are for example
>Ada, Modula-2 and Eiffel.
      ^^^^^^^^
Modula-2 is hardly a modern language, at least in the sense that it brings any
new ideas with it.  It is a rather poor extension of a language which, in its
purest form, is overly simple.  It is closer to a repackaging of an older
language than it is to being anything new.  For a more thorough criticism of
Modula-2, look up an article I wrote in the November 1985 ACM SIGPLAN Notices,
"System Programming in Modula-2".

Ada has much in its favor, but also its share of problems.  I know nothing of
Eiffel.

> [An illustration of C as a low level language]

I agree, C is a low level language, at least in the sense that it gives you
a programming model which is still very close to the machine.  It was intended
to be that way.  It will never replace higher level languages.  It was not
intended to.  I don't use C when I should use Lisp, APL, SmallTalk, ML, or
Prolog.  This shouldn't be a supprise to anyone -- I don't use a hammer to cut
boards, either.

>-- 
>Erland Sommarskog       
>ENEA Data, Stockholm
>sommar@enea.UUCP
>                   [Opinionated comment deleted]

--
Doug Pase   --   ...ucbvax!tektronix!ogcvax!pase  or  pase@cse.ogc.edu.csnet