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From: williams@umaxc.weeg.uiowa.edu (Kent Williams)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: a new langauge construct
Summary: When I see 'new language construct' I draw my revolver
Keywords: C++, units
Message-ID: <3111@ns-mx.uiowa.edu>
Date: 6 Nov 90 14:53:13 GMT
References: <1990Nov5.222550.14819@cs.columbia.edu>
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Reply-To: williams@umaxc.weeg.uiowa.edu.UUCP (Kent Williams)
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Organization: U of Iowa, Iowa City, IA
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A fellow I know who is deep into language design refers to C++ as 'COBOL for
the 90s', and I tend to agree -- there's too much syntax as it is, and as
evidenced by this group, too many obscure ways to be bit by it.  I'm not
that crazy about MI either -- just so you'll know where I'm coming from.

As for the 'Unit' construct, I think that this needs to be NOT a part
of the language, but rather part of the programming environment.  You
can get 99% of the way there by using 'make' and precompiling headers.

One of the cases the 'Unit' construct is employed to fix is where you
want to change one function in a large file.  The easier way to solve
this is NO LARGE FILES.

This is where a good programming environment comes into play.  I would
prefer to see a tool that is capable of managing large numbers of
classes and functions transparent to the user, and smart enough to
only recompile what changes.  The smalltalk browser comes to mind.

In the real world, I regularly work on programs where 80% of compile
time is spent parsing headers.   Precompiling headers would help this
immensely.  No change to a production compiler is trivial, but this
would be fairly easy, and doesn't involve language changes.  Even
pre-tokenizing could give you a performance win without costing a
large amount of deep thought!



--
             Kent Williams --- williams@umaxc.weeg.uiowa.edu 
"'Is this heaven?' --- 'No, this is Iowa'" - from the movie "Field of Dreams"
"This isn't heaven, ... this is Cleveland" - Harry Allard, in "The Stupids Die"