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From: anders@verity.com (Anders Wallgren)
Newsgroups: comp.object,comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: C++ and waitresses (summary, long)
Message-ID: <1991May24.204501.3238@verity.com>
Date: 24 May 91 20:45:01 GMT
References: <2326@media03.UUCP>
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Reply-To: anders@verity.com (Anders Wallgren)
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In-Reply-To: pkr@media03.UUCP (Peter Kriens)

In article <2326@media03.UUCP>, pkr@media03 (Peter Kriens) writes:
>
>One way or the other the industry seems to chose
>non-optimal solutions. We got stuck with MS-DOS, Windows
>and C++. I will use it, but I will always have a feeling
>that it could have been much easier if choices were made
>on performance instead of just marketing.
>
>	Peter Kriens
>
>	

I think this is a little bit unfair.  I'm very ambivalent about
languages, because to a great degree, they are all isomorphic.  It's
just a matter of what is easier do to with a particular language.

In my case, most of my formal academic training in computer science
and software engineering was done with very high-level languages:
lisp, clu, for example.  The same goes for many of the people I work
with.  On the other hand, we use C and C++ exclusively in our work,
simply because it is the most portable language we know of.  There's
nothing we would like more than being able to write our code in a
higher-level language than C.

This is _why_ I like C++ - it allows me to use many of the
higher-level constructs that allow me to do a better job,
software-engineering-wise, while still having (or at least
approaching) the portability of C itself.

I don't know why you chose C++, but I definately didn't pick it
because of 'marketing', or 'performance' for that matter.  I choose it
because it is an extension to an environment that allows me to write
portable code, but do it with a tool that is more than a 'high-level
assembler' (which is still a pretty good characterization of C).

anders