My advice on implementing stuff in C:

Posted Oct 19, 2010 22:02 UTC (Tue) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
In reply to: My advice on implementing stuff in C: by cmccabe
Parent article: Russell: On C Library Implementation

My point isn't what you can do with ISO-standard C. My point is what you can do with C, period.

Oh, so C isn't defined by a standard any more, but by what you think C is? I guess "you know it when you see it", right?

Yes, I am aware that the C pre-processor is a code generator. My point is that if code generation is going to be required, it ought to be part of the language rather than separate.

And my point is that cpp is pretty much the worst way to make it part of the language.

C/C++ has annotations too. Look up doxygen.

The Java equivalent to Doxygen is Javadoc. Annotations are something completely different; they are not (special) comments. And actually, C++0x will be supporting annotations, though they'll be called attributes there.

What part of my statement makes you think I don't know what Lisp is?

First, you didn't know that domain specific languages can be implemented with Lisp macros. Then you made the completely unfounded claim that Ruby is more suitable for implementing DSLs than Lisp. The following remark that "high-level languages do high level things better than low-level languages do." looked like a justification for that claim, and in the context it looks as if you're thinking of Lisp as a low-level language which it isn't.

When I read back through this thread, I'm not at all sure what you're advocating. You start off by condemning C and casually commenting "C++ has been around for a long time, and while it's not exactly a beautiful language, it does provide huge benefits over C." Then, when people challenge you to explain these "huge benefits," you air a bunch of minor grievances about small things like implicit conversions in the type system and lack of features present in Standard ML (Seriously? We're comparing a low-level language to Standard ML?)

I explicitly pointed out that some ideas from Standard ML, such as having strong typing, polymorphism and a module system, have nothing at all to do with whether it's a high level language or a low level one. Please, just read carefully

You go on to raise a bunch of "but I can't do X" whines, which I then counter with "here is how you do X in C."

All you've shown is that you're missing the point. The point is that cpp doesn't understand the C language. You then pointed out that it is possible to use cpp to generate a C program that fails to compile under certain circumstances. That is something completely and utterly different, and the fact that you still didn't understand it doesn't speak for you.

Probably the only valid point you raised at all is that generic programming would make a good addition to C.

Yeah right, because I didn't point out how con- and destructors (or RAII for short) massively simplifies resource management at the very beginning.

I'm sorry that you feel so negatively about C. And really, I'm sorry that you feel so negatively about programming languages in general. If you could offer a constructive suggestion rather than "everything sucks," people might actually listen to you.

I've pointed out what I think the worst problems with C are (sucky preprocessor, lack of a module system, lack of support for generic programming, lack of support for resource management), and I honestly think that these problems are so bad that nobody should be using C, except if no compiler for a better language is available for your target platform(s).
Also, contrary to your claim, I did point out alternatives: D, C++, Rust and Go, at the very beginning of this thread. I don't want to advocate any particular one, because I think that people should make up their own minds about what language they want. And also because I think that it'd obscure my point which is not "Language X is better than C", but "get rid of C if you can". If you don't like that -- tough.

Perhaps if you had been Kernigan or Ritchie, you would have put an "e" in the creat() function. Or changed C so that shorts did not get implicitly promoted to int. But you weren't, and they didn't, so we're just going to have to get on with our lives.

Unlike you, I'd rather try to fix mistakes from the past, rather than carrying them around forever and trying to cope with them forever.