On Mon, 4 Nov 2013 20:57:12 +0400
"Alexander S." <alex0player_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> if something was invented in the era of insufficient computing power,
> it does make it more clunky to use.
Why should it be more clunky? It just allows you to fine-tune it. If
you don't want to reinvent the wheel use libraries. Internally that's
what very high-level languages do. They all have frameworks or similar
stuff. And what exactly do you find clunky in it?
> Being old isn't what makes C old;
What?
> the "1001 C Gotcha" lists are about what makes it bad. The ugly hacks
> like longjmp and varargs make it bad.
Indeed, those 2 are ugly. But just because it's there it doesn't mean
you have to use it. I never used longjmp for instance, and only used
varargs for a simple printf wrapper. Works fine if one keeps it simple.
Yes there are probably more, but all in all I find C to be a very
elegant language in itself. Google didn't turn up with anything
interesting when I searched for that.
> C++ would be a much more decent
> language if it didn't build on C syntax.
That's not C's fault is it? :)
Maybe I should mention that I'm in physics, and generally we need very
fast number crunchers. C and Fortran are generally our best bet. And I
hate fortran! Matlab programs have to be very well written to be
almost as quick as a C program. I once rewrote a matlab piece of
software in C. Got from 15min of runtime to 0.4s. Same conditions
exactly. Took me 1h to do it. Used it hundreds of times. Python
programs we write are only fast enough because internally they rely on
low-level routines (scipy and numpy) and they're mainly used for
students' problems.
--
Raimundo Martins <raimundoomartins_AT_gmail.com>
Received on Mon Nov 04 2013 - 19:09:21 CET