Re: C Language -- MIDRANGE-L


On 08/09/2004, at 7:48 AM, Dave Odom wrote:

However, I'm not sure either of them have the power of Assembler or
"Assembler in Cursive": C/C++ as only they can address memory and you'd
better know what you're doing as it won't give you Mickysoft "are you
sure you want to do that" types of messages.   It ASSUMES you are a
professional and know what your doing.   Whether that's a good
assumption is another story.

Any language that supports pointers let's you address memory thus memory access is not a prerogative of C (nor its incremental derivative). Even COBOL and RPG can provide arbitrary access to memory.

C's major problem is that it makes no distinction between pointers, arrays, or strings. That, along with no idea about fixed-length character variables, no idea of true varying-length character variables, no decimal data type, excessive data typing, the treatment of character as a numeric data type, and a number of other things makes it unsuitable for anything except truly low-level code where an assembler would be ideal but you'd like a bit more function than an assembler generally provides.

C is OK (not good) for low-level stuff but crap for anything higher. The incremental derivative of C is no better at high-level code because it has its own collection of unexpected behaviours, traps, and flaws. The cost in time of developing in C is higher than almost any other language.

There is a deal of difference between expecting the user of a programming tool to be a professional and providing absolutely no support from the compiler. Even seasoned C professionals get bitten by the if (x=y) rubbish and any number of other stupid things that C compiles--hence the proliferation of Lint-like tools to catch the sort of stupidities that a decent compiler could be expected to reject.

PL/1 will do everything C can do but still manages to provide protection to the programmer. If the programmer chooses to use pointers to directly access storage in PL/1 they can (and are subject to the same caveats as doing this in C) but it is a conscious choice of the programmer rather than the compiler forcing that level of care on the programmer because the original C compiler writers wanted to make life easy for themselves.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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