Re: [MLUG] D language

["Jonathan King" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 6/29/07, Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> 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.

Me, not so much. Having to look at "int c" is bearable, but function
declaration quickly get painful. So the classic extreme example is the
declaration for set_new_handler:

void (*set_new_handler(void (*)(void)))(void);

That's a function whose argument return values are both pointers to a
function that takes a void argument and takes a void result.  Now,
that's never going to be too easy, but Damian Conway, in a pre-Perl
hacker moment, co-wrote a paper called "A modest proposal: C++
resyntaxed" that proposed a system that was much more obvious. So I
don't really need to tell you what this:

func set_new_handler : (^(void->void) -> ^(void->void));

> I started computer programming when the other languages in
> vogue were Fortran, Pascal, Algol, Cobol and PL/1.

I had to learn both Fortran and Pascal. There's no question that C
looks pretty good compared to those.

> Really, C outdoes
> them all in terms of style.

It outdoes them in some way. I think what I always liked was the fact
that memory layout was almost completely transparent and the whole
thing was just highly structured assembler.

> Of those I mentioned, I think only Fortran
> is still used (by engineers and scientists),

And Cobol, of course; although it's fading, I am not sure it will ever die.

> 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.

I think it is really fair. C++ is just simply too big and hairy a
language. C programmers all should have found it easy to pick up,
given its history, but we all know that this isn't really so. And it's
too bad, because there are some really cool ideas in there along with
all of the baggage.

> 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 separate book.

K&R is just awesome, although some of the techniques it demonstrates
you would not want to use in the modern age (e.g., their string
copying stuff just screams "attack me!"). I think you are being a bit
unfair on the programming library part because you're likely to have
to read a lot of docs to use whatever C libraries you really need,
too, and there are a lot of them to choose from. C++ took the
(probably overly) monolithic approach. I can always convince myself
that C++ should be worth it because the STL is so cool, but time keeps
passing, and I don't write very much C++ code.

jking

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