On 10/25/07, Andrew Lentvorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Bob La Quey wrote: > > I am in basic agreement with using an appropriate > > scripting language whenever possible. I would say > > in defense of C, after one builds up from the low > > level, then one is effectively working with a scripting > > languge that just has C as its syntax. > > Sorry, I might agree, but I have never seen a good set of libraries for > C that matches even the basic (hash, list, vector) data structures > available in any scripting language.
Understood, but are not those underlying data structures nearly always implemented in C? Seems somehow odd that these implementations are good in scripting languages but not in C itself. > > One is using C functions and libraries that do mostly > > the same thing that the scripting language is doing. > > Then they should go get D (http://www.digitalmars.com/d/) or Objective C > or something. Probably true. > > In some ways it is more economical intellectually to > > simply stay in C. Multi hundred line programs do _not_ > > have to be inpenetrable if they are well written. > > No, but it is more intellectual effort to *read* no matter how well > written. Finding a bug in 200 lines is always harder than finding one > in 10 lines--even if the 10 line program is Perl ;) We may have to disagree about this. In Perl in particular the unreadability comes about because Perl has a huge number of context variables that the expert Perl programmer is referring to when ever a single line of code is written. Perhaps the simplest example is something like print ; Or some such. Huh? print what? OH, $_ (What the hell is that?) And BTW printing $_ is followed by printing the current value of $\ which is WHAT? The more expert the Perl programmer the more use they make of the context hence the shorter the code and less explicit the code gets. It becomes a lot like trying to decipher a poem by a hugely literate poet who makes endless allusion to other poems. At some point the poet is talking only to herself and her private world context. BobLQ BobLQ -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
