"John S. Gage" wrote:
> Just to play the devil's advocate (that's the C devil's advoCate), here
> is some source from Tcl (*not* Tcl source):
>
> .. code snippet removed
>
> Admittedly, the concepts are fairly low level: sockets, flags, and such,
> but this is code that can be maintained! This is undoubtedly open
> source at its best.
I have no problem with good C code. I wrote it for over 6 years, and instigated an
entire C-based working environment at a company, which included template based
editing, automatically extracted documentation (man pages) and online debug. They
are still using the code created by this process for nearly 10 years now.
But... to guarantee this, all developers had to be trained to follow style
guidelines, use certain tools etc.
> I guess the problem here is predicting the evolution of open source. It
> certainly started with C (Stallman, Torvald, etc.), but will it stay
> there? Obviously, I don't know.
I don't think there is any need to stick with one language. We use Eiffel because it
is 10 times more expressive than C, and can directly model health concepts, which C
can't. To write equivalent systems, you also write far less code, and the
maintainability is higher. Other languages are used because they offer certain
characteristics, e.g. GUI development etc.
- thomas beale
