Date : Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:42:05 +0100
From : afra@... (afra@...)
Subject: Beeb, this was your grandma!
Quoting Rick Murray <rick@...>:
> It must suck to be introduced to computers at school these days.
> Hi, "I'm a PC" and this is Microsoft Office...
Agreed there !
> At least I can thank the design of the BBC Micro for positively inviting
> its innards to be fiddled with.
Or indeed most micros from the 80's.
[snip!]
> * - PLEASE tell me they aren't still inflicting Pascal on poor hapless
> students. It's SO useless. Okay, it enforces discipline and makes you
> think about what you are doing, but then what? What's written in Pascal?
More than you think if you also include Delphi/Freepascal/Lazarus as
they are all pascal based. As I believe was a whole bunch of Apple's
MacOS code back in the day.
> Maybe everything got stuck over some pointless rule about
> one-entry-one-exit to a function, a flaw which actually requires you to
> write crap non-intuitive code in order to satisfy this illogical rant.
Whereas having spaggetti code with multiple entry/exit points is a
good thing ?
> One, and can you really be stuck to a language that reads "upside down"
> because way-back-when the language was implemented at a one-pass
> compiler? This isn't way-back-when, sort it.
Well in C you also have to define something before you use it, which
admittedly you can do with function prototypes now, but could you back
then ? More modern Pascal compilers also have a facility like this also.
> All considered, I think it would be much better if somebody got off
> their advocacy-ass and coded up a drool-proof C [#] compiler [!].
Can't comment on C# as I never used it.....
> # - Not C++. My uncle wrote a detailed book on C++ programming (several,
Likewise with C++
> ! - This isn't to say C is perfect. There's a lot of nonsense, like
> whether to include <this> or "this", or indirect like.this or
> like->this. There are reasons, but it's a pain, as is the TOTAL lack of
> bounds checking and such in 99% of compilers. Bounds checking might add
> penalties, but I've seen some HORRIBLE things (probably got some in my
> own code) that the clumsiest Duplo-level intelligence bounds checking
> would have picked up, but never got noticed as the corruption "wasn't
> bad enough" to make the flaw obvious.
Indeed and it's things like that that can lead to code being insecure
by having buffer overflows etc.
> But on the other hand, pretty much the entirety of certain mainstream
> operating systems and most ALL the software supplied with, is written in
> C. You could argue this isn't necessarily a good thing. I would
> counter-argue, show me the one written in Pascal...
As said before Large parts of early MacOS where I believe Pascal, as
was Apollo Aegis/Domain.
Please don't see this as a Pascal is better than C rant it's not meant
that way, and I do program quite frequently in both. However sometimes
one tool is better for achieving a task sometimes another and there is
no one language that is good at everything.
Cheers.
Phill.
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