Walter Bright wrote:
Don wrote:
Well, if you ask the question "what's C++'s biggest mistake?" it's
much more difficult. C++'s failure to specify the ABI is enough of a
reason to use C instead, I reckon. It think it's an appalling,
inexcusable mistake -- it guaranteed compiled libraries 20 years later
would use extern(C), not extern(C++). And that's not the worst C++
mistake.
I'd be hard pressed to come up with C++'s biggest mistake. Perhaps it
was failing to address the array => pointer conversion.
I think the biggest mistake was preserving backwards source-code
compatibility with C, but _still_ managing to lose many of C's
advantages. As a pure superset of C, it _should_ have been able to
replace 100% of the uses of C, but failed miserably.
