Am 12.01.2018 um 20:42 schrieb Seymour J Metz:
I disagree; C is not remotely like assembly language, and the pre-processor is
pathetic compared to any other macro facility that I have seen. The confusion
between pointers and arrays and the zero-delimited strings are booby traps for
the unwary.
As to C++, it provides classes that are not subject to all of the pitfalls of
the underlying C, so I would regard it as a safer choice.
My experience is: C++ is VERY unsafe, because memory leaks are omnipresent
with C++. Even very experienced C++ developers (in their own thinking)
have a
very hard time explaining what's the reason of the memory leaks that I
discovered in their code.
To make it clear: I am a C programmer (and PL/1, ASSEMBLER, Pascal etc.)
and don't think of myself as a C++ expert; I only wrote some entry level
C++ programs.
But I was in charge of the maintenance of a very large software system
which had SOME
C++ modules in it; the greater part was C. And the memory leaks almost
always
occured in the C++ part.
I used some tools like the MEMCHECK heap manager (CEL4MCHK) and other
tools (even self-written)
to locate the memory leaks in the very large code base; the C++ folks
tried the same with
ValGrind, but most of the time I was faster.
IMO, C++ cannot be used to produce large reliable software packages; you
would need
ONLY SUPER SMART developers in your team, but as soon as there are some
mediocre
co-workers, you are lost.
With C, for example, you can always catch the storage allocations
functions (there are
only 4, after all: malloc, calloc, realloc, free) and replace them in
the whole software package
by something different which does all sort of diagnose, all that you
want. Try that in C++ ...
Furthermore, when fighting with those memory leaks, I discovered (and my
C++ affine
co-workers, too), that the different implementations of C++ on the
mainframe, on
Windows, on Solaris, did DIFFERENT things, which were all allowed by the
standard.
The C++ specialists couldn't agree about which platform does it right :-)
This is not an environment where I would like to work ... with C there
are no such problems.
My 2 cents ...
Kind regards
Bernd
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3
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