Scott Mcmahan vs Laurence Kirby

R

rbhlgjwbvi

There seems to be a bug in the forum that it won't let you reply to
topics older than 60 days :(

Anyway, there's this interesting exchange from 29 Oct 1999:

Lawrence said:
Very much so, the new standard contains a lot of useful features.
Once C99 compilers become commonplace which I would expect to happen in
the next 2-3 years a lot of new code will start to be written using it.
However compilers will probably support C90 for some time to come.

Time has proved one of these men a prophet! C99 is the embodiment of a
lame duck.
 
D

Default User

There seems to be a bug in the forum that it won't let you reply to
topics older than 60 days :(

That's not a bug, that's a feature that was added because Google Group
people were replying to years-old messages as if they were new ones.




Brian
 
R

Richard Heathfield

(e-mail address removed) said:
There seems to be a bug in the forum that it won't let you reply to
topics older than 60 days :(

That's not a bug - it's a feature! :)

Seriously, if people were to make a habit of replying to seemingly random
articles from seven years ago, without the context that prevailed at the
time being conveniently available (after all, we don't *all* use Google,
you know), this group would become much *less* useful.

But the occasional blast from the past can be fun.
Anyway, there's this interesting exchange from 29 Oct 1999:

Lawrence Kirby is Hardly Ever Wrong. On that occasion, however, he does
appear to have been wr... well, not right.
Time has proved one of these men a prophet! C99 is the embodiment of a
lame duck.

Nah. Lame ducks might waddle a bit awkwardly, but at least they can fly.
 
M

Malcolm McLean

Anyway, there's this interesting exchange from 29 Oct 1999:



Time has proved one of these men a prophet! C99 is the embodiment of a
lame duck.
When I first saw the stl I thought "This is the end of C", because all the
operations that were efficient in C could be made even more efficient in
C++. Some timings I saw were very convincing.

However actually the reverse happened. STL was baroque syntax too far, and
seems to have dealt a serious blow to C++.
 
R

rbhlgjwbvi

Richard said:
Seriously, if people were to make a habit of replying to seemingly random
articles from seven years ago, without the context that prevailed at the
time being conveniently available (after all, we don't *all* use Google,
you know), this group would become much *less* useful.

I'm not sure... there are lots of really interesting topics from the
past, some with hundreds of posts. I'm sure people could have more to
say now, especially posters at the time who might have a different
opinion with hindsight.
 
R

rbhlgjwbvi

Malcolm said:
When I first saw the stl I thought "This is the end of C", because all the
operations that were efficient in C could be made even more efficient in
C++. Some timings I saw were very convincing.

However actually the reverse happened. STL was baroque syntax too far, and
seems to have dealt a serious blow to C++.

I despise C++ and refuse to use it or think about it, so I can't really
comment on the effects of the STL. However, it sounds like the
difference between that and C99 is that the STL added features that are
actually useful if you can get past the ugly syntax, whereas C99 didn't
add a single useful feature to the language, but only pointlessly
complicated bloat.
 
D

Default User

I'm not sure... there are lots of really interesting topics from the
past, some with hundreds of posts. I'm sure people could have more to
say now, especially posters at the time who might have a different
opinion with hindsight.

Nonsensical. Topics can certainly come up again (they do constantly)
but it's near impossible to restart one with years-old context. As I
mentioned elsewhere, GG users were doing exactly that when the "Beta"
interface was dumped out on a unsuspecting public. That was high up on
the bug list of GG Beta, which they finally got around to fixing.

Most news services have a retention span of a few weeks to a few
months, which seems to work about right. Trying to revive dead threads
in place makes little or no sense. Most people won't have the context
on their services and wouldn't care to root back through GG archives
for it. Trying to post it would either leave out much of it or be
unreadable.

So, Google got it right, you got it wrong.




Brian
 
S

santosh

Malcolm said:
When I first saw the stl I thought "This is the end of C", because all the
operations that were efficient in C could be made even more efficient in
C++. Some timings I saw were very convincing.

However actually the reverse happened. STL was baroque syntax too far, and
seems to have dealt a serious blow to C++.

I despise C++ and refuse to use it or think about it, [...]

Aren't you perhaps getting a bit emotional? It's just a programming
language after all, if you don't prefer, then don't use it.
so I can't really
comment on the effects of the STL. However, it sounds like the
difference between that and C99 is that the STL added features that are
actually useful if you can get past the ugly syntax, whereas C99 didn't
add a single useful feature to the language, but only pointlessly
complicated bloat.

IMHO, macros with variable arguments, empty arguments, the inline
keyword, declarations in the for loop, long long type, va_copy() are
all useful to have. I wouldn't say that C99 didn't add a single useful
feature. Also can you specify what you mean when you say above that the
C99 standard has added pointlessly complicated bloat? Are you talking
about the standard library or the core langauge?
 
A

Ark

> whereas C99 didn't
add a single useful feature to the language, but only pointlessly
complicated bloat.

Is it so that only embedded people care these days about the size,
startup time and maintainability?!
If you can pre-compute things at compile time (and force the build break
if the underlying assumptions are no longer valid), isn't it great?
So, C99 designated initializers are alone worth the new version of the
standard.
Imagine a const array some or all elements of which have their indices
published to be accessed directly. Try to maintain this in C90 or C++.
In fact I had to write my own preprocessor (Unimal) to address issues
like that (and the first version was mimicking macro processors of good
assemblers). With C99, about 30% of things for which I used Unimal can
be done in C alone.
So I don't think one can say C99 added no useful features if one doesn't
recognize them or simply doesn't need them.

- Ark
 
W

William Hughes

There seems to be a bug in the forum that it won't let you reply to
topics older than 60 days :(

Anyway, there's this interesting exchange from 29 Oct 1999:



Time has proved one of these men a prophet! C99 is the embodiment of a
lame duck.

Well, modulo the usual argument that if A predicts a coin will show
heads and B predicts tails, the fact that the coin shows heads does
not make A a prophet (I am not arguing that this analogy holds, just
that it always needs to be considered), I would agree. The scarcity
of C99 compilers, the moribund state of gcc's C99 conformance
work, and most tellingly the scarcity of support for C99 in tools,
certainly suggests that C99 is not a success. The usual counter
of "give it time" is beginning to ring very hollow indeed.

-William Hughes
 
C

Christopher Benson-Manica

Malcolm McLean said:
When I first saw the stl I thought "This is the end of C", because all the
operations that were efficient in C could be made even more efficient in
C++. Some timings I saw were very convincing.

I doubt C would have ended in any case, as I would expect the same C90
compilers for embedded platforms to be used for years (decades?) to
come.
However actually the reverse happened. STL was baroque syntax too far, and
seems to have dealt a serious blow to C++.

I think that may be overstating the case somewhat, although admittedly
formatted output which printf() has always handled cleanly is an utter
disaster using <iostream>.
 

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