Re: [MLUG] D language

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Jonathan King wrote:
> On 6/29/07, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> > I hadn't heard of D until I received the message below.  Any of you guys
> > using it yet?
>
> I had heard of it, and I think it would have been wonderful if we had
> had this to mess with rather than C. The problem, of course, is that
> we didn't, and by giving up source code compatibility with C, D has
> this weird feature of being really C-like, but not quite C. And I have
> no idea why they basically kept the dorky declaration syntax.
>
> So, once again, D looks like a pretty cool language, like Icon, Pike,
> limbo, Sather, and a bunch of others. I think the problem with most of
> these things is that they are certainly way cool, but they either
> aren't different enough (in niche or style) or popular enough to hit
> the threshold they would need to displace the Big 4 (which are
> Fortran, C, C++ and Java). I think the ones most likely to do so are
> higher performance versions of some scripting languages, or something
> like O'Caml, which is mathematically neat but also has excellent
> performance.
>
> Also, unless you're doing heavy numeric lifting or something, a lot of
> the time even something with performance as punky as python, perl, or
> ruby is just fine performance wise. So it goes...
>
> jking

I myself like C very, very much.  I think its dorky style is totally 
excellent.  I started computer programming when the other languages in 
vogue were Fortran, Pascal, Algol, Cobol and PL/1.  Really, C outdoes 
them all in terms of style.  Of those I mentioned, I think only Fortran 
is still used (by engineers and scientists), and Cobol programmers were 
needed to fix the Y2K bug because it used to be the business language of 
choice.  Pascal, Algol and PL/1 were the structured programming 
languages I learned, and C outranked them all.

I dabbled a bit with C++.  I didn't really like it.  But I have a lot of 
experience with C, and so perhaps the comparison isn't really fair.

One of the big advantages of C is the totally excellent book written by 
its founders.  The equivalent C++ book is long winded and unreadable, 
and anyway you then also have to read about the standard programming 
library in a seperate book.

_______________________________________________
members mailing list
EMAIL:PROTECTED
http://mlug.missouri.edu/mailman/listinfo/members