Re: despair

Ron Johnson wrote:
On 09/21/07 11:30, JF Mezei wrote:

Bob Koehler wrote:

So what do you think you can do in C that can't be done in Macro-32
on any VMS system?


Since all languages eventually get translated into machine code,
obviously there is nothing that can be done in a higher level language
that cannot be done in Macro.


I really do not understand why some people go out of their way to
criticise C. C gives you the flexibility of assembler while giving you
higher level language tools. So you can write applications with much
greater efficiency than with some assembly language.

And you know, I've never really had problems with lack of bounds
checking. Especially with dynamically allocated structures, you still
need to keep track of how many items you have used and how many have
been pre-allocated.

And C has become quite pedantic with regards to type checks, so when you
want to cheat and take 4 bytes from a string and load then into an
integer, you need to be specific about it so the compiler won't bother
you. But you can do it.


C is not for kids. You need good programming skills and experience to
write good C code that has proper architecture to prevent problems
and/or detect them.


But not everyone on your team will have good programming skills, and
neither will the all of the maintainers who come after you.

IMNSHO, there are languages which are just *better* for writing
large apps in specific "spaces".

Why use a language designed to fit a time-sharing OS and
text-processing apps onto a PDP-11 to write:

Sometimes you are constrained by the available compilers! The last time I looked (quite a while ago) compilers for the machines I was using were about $5000 US each! At my last job we had ONE compiler license. It was for C. We ran it on our development system, an Alphaserver 2100. Nobody was about to spring for another compiler for my convenience.

I used it for maintaining a few Unix style utilities (make, grep, and gawk). The make was posted by Tony Ivanov back in the late 80's or early 90's! I don't recall where the grep and gawk came from but I've found them quite handy over the years.





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