Am 26.09.2014 23:32, schrieb "Ola Fosheim Grøstad"
<[email protected]>":
On Friday, 26 September 2014 at 20:48:20 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
I started coding C++ on MS-DOS in 1993 with Turbo C++ 1.0 all the way
up to Turbo C++ 1.5 for Windows 3.x. Also used Borland C++ occasionally.
I cannot remember any longer which version eventually added support
for exceptions, but it was already a Windows 3.x version I would say.
Watcom had some exception support around 1993 according to
comp.lang.c++, but it was probably not a big selling point to add it for
other vendors on the MS platforms.
Watcom only became big on MS-DOS when they started offering a 32bit
MS-DOS extender (remember those?). That feature, coupled with good code
generation, made many game studios go for it.
But that is the only thing I know from it. In Portugal, Borland and
Microsoft ruled the MS-DOS developer tools.
I remember it was very difficult to find a good free C++ implementation
though. Cfront was kind of annoying (and did not support exceptions
either). In the free software movement C/Unix was the real deal and my
impression was that C++ was not viewed as "cool", so it took a while for
g++ to get the quality up to acceptable standards.
Back in those days I got to buy my tools. Only knew what FOSS was about
around 1995.
In 1993 I got hold of Turbo C 2.0 and Turbo C++ 1.0, after a couple of
years of doing Turbo Pascal, already with OOP using Turbo Vision.
C just looked stone age when compared with Turbo Pascal 6.0 features and
I immediately switched to C++ after a few months of pure C.
Since then I have been on C++ troop ranks on the usual C vs C++ debates.
The sad thing is that nowadays many new C++ programmers behave against
languages with automatic memory management, the same way we were seen by
C programmers in those days.
You quite right about us not being cool in UNIX world. Outside of CORBA,
it was always an uphill battle to use C++. Specially in the FOSS front.
I wrote one of the first tutorials on how to use yacc/bison and lex/flex
with C++ instead of C, as I could not find any.
--
Paulo
