🚀 go-pugleaf

jmartin@cs.ucla.edu (Jay Martin) writes:

>nelsoni@rintintin.Colorado.EDU (Ian S. Nelson) writes:
>> Ignorant stuff about how C is not the ultimate language.
>Come on!  What do you think the #1 Computer Science Dept. in the US
>teaches, not Ada or Modula* but C!  This proves that C is 100X better
>than Ada!  What does the rest of Computer Science use for doing
>research?: C and Unix!  

Hi Jay!

Popularity does not necessarily imply intrinsic worth. The suitability
of a language (``best-ness'') depends highly on the problem one is
trying to solve. C makes an excellent general purpose language;
it is very practical and widely available. However, it is difficult
to say that ``C is the Best!'' generally, even though it is the lan-
guage that to me is as natural as English, German and Spanish, and
one which I like best for most purposes. In some of work, I use Lisp
and Prolog---mostly in symbolic mathematics, pattern recognition and
event reconstruction/filtering.

>Desirable CS Attribute                 C     Ada
>----------------------------------------------------------------
>Terseness                              10     0
>Stuff Combined in 1 statement          10     0

Not _always_ desirable. Some programmers lack the discipline and
abuse the terseness of the language, producing code that may be
difficult to maintain.

The situation can be likened to Maxwell's equations, written in
four-dimensional form. Yes, very terse and very compact---all of
classical electrodynamics fits on one line. However, for practical
work, such as antenna or generator design, more verbose represen-
tations are better suited, although no ``new'' information or 
phenomena are involved beyond Maxwell's equations.

>No Straitjackets whatsoever            10     0

...and a very thin safety net goes hand-in-hand with this. Even with
extreme care, sometimes stuff falls through. Opposed as I am to 
tyrannical type checking, for instance, as exemplified by Ada, Pascal
or Modula-n, the very loose type system in C can be tightened up a
bit. This feat was quite nicely accomplished in C++.


Best regards,
Derick.

--
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Derick R. Qua-Gonzalez                                      | ________ |
| Department of Physics, California State University          | \      / |
| dqua@EarthLink.Net                                          |  \    /  |
|     ``It is better to be hated for what one is,             |   \  /   |
|       than loved for what one is not.'' (A. Gide)           | 32 \/ USA|
+-------------------------------------------------------------+----------+