On Mon, 19 Feb 2001, Mark John Buenconsejo wrote:
> btw, there's only a few IT professionals who are using C at work. so it's
> good to get the students involve in the list and also the hackers. ;-)
> anyway, pag algo ang topics, nde naman importante ang programming language.
>
I beg to differ. The programming language can be vitally important when
discussing certain types of algorithms and data structures. Have you ever
tried to do list processing in Visual Basic? Or string manipulation in C?
Or code up an encryption program in Pascal? Languages tend to be
optimized to do various things, and while you surely can do most anything
with most modern programming languages, that does not mean you can do it
cleanly or elegantly. List processing in VB is almost impossible because
VB doesn't even support structures, string processing in C tends to be so
clumsy because of static limits on string length, and Pascal doesn't have
the kind of bit-twiddling operations common in cryptography. No language
can be all things to all problems, and any sane discussion of algorithmics
should take this into account.
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