On Tue, Oct 01, 2002 at 11:03:04AM +0100, Paul Millar wrote > On Fri, 27 Sep 2002, Aidan Skinner wrote:
> > Three things: > > > > 1. C is /still/ the most used programming language, for god only knows > > what reason > > Hmmm, that certainly used to be true, but I guess its probably not > anymore. Hasn't C++ overtaken it (as in Visual C++ for example), or > (shudder) VBA? Porbably for new projects, although C ain't dead there either, but I suspect the majority of code is probably still in C. I don't have any numbers to support this assertion though. In any case, a lot of C++ is written as C-with-extra-keywords ;) > As for why C is popular: it does the job, its *largely* portable and, if > you abstract out hardware differences, it can be made portable. What more > do you _need_? A safety catch so I don't shoot myself in the foot, not being able to assign in a conditional, write past the end of an array.... > > and you don't get muhch lower level than semi-portable asm. > > Pointing out the obvious, but asm isn't portable, really. Only on the same > architecture. I know, I was making deregotary comments towards C. ;) > I don't want to rave about C, but it does let you do all those > bit-twiddling things without having to resort to assembler. If compilers As do a whole bunch of other languages that provide a bit more of a saftey net.. > Yep. very much so. BTW, I hadn't heard of skip lists before. After a > little Googling, I found an implementation that looked rather like a > binary tree. Are the two roughly the same? Pretty much yeah, although skip lists have a couple of nice properties regarding insertion and deletion comlpexity that trees don't. - Aidan -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.velvet.net/~aidan/ aim:aidans42 http://www.livejournal.com/users/aidan_skinner/ finger for pgp key: 01AA 1594 2DB0 09E3 B850 C2D0 9A2C 4CC9 3EC4 75E1
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