Re: [GD-General] Eiffel

[Patrick M D. <pa...@wa...>]

On Sat, 22 Dec 2001, Brian Hook wrote:

> I would put this another way: C++ was trying to be idiom-neutral and
> provide all the tools for any kind of programming style.  Because of this,
> you can become very proficient in one tiny aspect of C++.  I feel I know
> C++ very well for my purposes, but because I purposefully have avoided
> templates, exception handling, MI and many other things that I consider
> more problematic than worthwhile, I can't say I "know" C++.  In fact, I'm
> not sure many people can say they know the whole language since the whole
> language is overkill for any specific framework design.

There are many kinds of programming styles that C++ fails to implement. It
does a decent job with traditional structured programming and
object-oriented programming.  Generic programming is extremely awkward,
as is functional programming.  There is no support for logic
programming.

I feel I can honestly say that I know C++ well - but this knowledge comes
from using other languages that are better than C++, and also developing
in it for the past 10 years or so.  The language is far from overkill - it
fails to offer crucial functionality in almost every programming paradigm.

Despite some major semantic limitations, there were terrible choices made
regarding syntax.  As an example, consider a case where some code needs to
be made generic.  It has a dependency on a particular structure that
should now be parameterizable.  To make this transition in C++ requires
changing almost every line of code.  Contrast this with OCaml which
requires two lines of code for the implementation and one line of code in
the namespace using the new parameterized structure.

> I would even argue that any framework that uses EVERY element of C++ is
> probably a disaster.

Hmm... I'm not aware of any feature of C++ that has not seemed appropriate
in some context -- they are there for a reason.  The desire for such
features does not inherently make the framework a disaster, although
bending over backwards to conform to C++ syntax might make the programmer
go crazy.

Patrick