Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!lfcs!nick From: nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Nick Rothwell) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Relationship between C and C++ Message-ID: <2977@castle.ed.ac.uk> Date: 22 Mar 90 11:59:06 GMT References: <8432@hubcap.clemson.edu> <6515@eos.UUCP> <2944@castle.ed.ac.uk> Reply-To: nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Nick Rothwell) Organization: Jenny Agutter Appreciation Society of Edinburgh Lines: 49 In-reply-to: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) In article , peter@ficc (Peter da Silva) writes: >There are only two languages I know of in which you can take a moderately >complex program and run it, without modification, on a wide variety of >platforms. > >One is Fortran, with the Software Tools library. >The other is C. >it's going to take more than >theoretical arguments about safety to make me change. It's going to take >working code. Which is a quite reasonable argument. Pointer-safe languages generally require garbage-collected heaps, which means size. So I can see that a language like C which is required to run on Machines With Tiny Brains will not be "safe" in that respect. But, this leaves two issues open: (i) why C has such an idiotic syntax, arbitrary type-checking, lax compile-time checks and so on, and (ii) why people think that C's features provide "power" in general-purpose programming. Point (i) is an accident of history. Point (ii) still intrigues me. >For what other language can I get compatible compilers for: > UNIX > IBM-PC > Amiga > Atari ST > Macintosh > RSX-11/M > VAX/VMS > RMX-86 I find that C's adherence to an implementation-defined word size limits portability anyway; but I don't think that's an avoidable problem. >The only other language system that came close was UCSD Pascal, and >it's dead. And we mourn its passing. Full PASCAL and screen editor in 56K. Them were the days. > _--_|\ `-_-' Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. . Nick. -- Nick Rothwell, Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh. nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk !mcsun!ukc!lfcs!nick ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ A prop? ...or wings? A prop? ...or wings? A prop?