On 20 Jul., 21:59, James Kanze <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Jul 20, 10:50 am, "Alf P. Steinbach" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > * James Kanze: > > > C was never really a good general purpose language. It was > > > never used (nor even usable) in commercial software, for > > > example. > > I'm not sure that statement is valid. > > It would be very surprising, to say the least, if no or just a > > very few commercial applications were written in C. > > There are certainly a few. Way back when, however, the X/Open > group proposed standardizing a form of Cobol (under Unix!) > because C was felt to be unusable for business applications. > > At least certain types of business applications require some > sort of decimal type. If the language doesn't have it built in > (as Cobol and PL-1 did), and it doesn't have operator > overloading, expressions quickly become unreadable. For those > applications, at least, if the language doesn't have a built-in > decimal type, and it doesn't have operator overloading, then > it's really unusable for those applications (although you'll > doubtlessly find some masocists doing it). > That was the case for "my" financial application. It had decimal-based arithmetic, and writing expressions in C was add(multiply(a,b),divide(c,d)) instead of a*b+ c/d. But as a lot of the high-level code was written in our own, interpreted language anyway it did not matter so much.
/Peter _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
