On 2/4/2013 12:10 AM, Maxim Fomin wrote:
On Monday, 4 February 2013 at 07:50:41 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 2/3/2013 10:11 PM, Maxim Fomin wrote:
Old C programmers are experts in
some fields and do not follow cool and idiotic ideas in programming languages.
C's design isn't free of mistakes, either.
That's for sure. And time factor contributed to the gap between how C is
evaluated today and how it was evaluated when was established.
I try to look at C's design mistakes in the context of the time when it was
created, rather than in today's context which would be unreasonable.
For example, despite history showing the preprocessor to be a bad idea, it was a
good idea at the time, especially considering the small amount of memory
available to the compiler. It enabled a lot of powerful capability for a small
amount of compiler technology.
A serious design mistake that is understandable but less forgivable is the
conflation of arrays and pointers, and I'd argue that is C's worst mistake.
C++'s use of < > for template parameters is not forgivable because many people
correctly predicted its problems at the time.
