Re: c code vs c++ code

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Katie Lucas wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 24, 2002 at 06:01:21AM -0500, Jason Stechschulte wrote:
> 
> 
>>I'm wondering if there is some benefit to using the C code rather than
>>the C++ code.  Is it possibly better for porting to other systems?  Or
>>is it simply programmer preference?
>>
> 
> I have, in the course of my travels around the development world, met
> quite a lot of people who put "C++ developer" as their
> profession. Stunningly, scarily, terrifyingly few of them are actually
> anything over "C and isn't class neat cos I can put methods in structs
> with it" developers.

...but there are also programmers who could quote you the C++ standard
verbatim but don't grok fundamental things like the distinction
between "A-is-a-kind-of-B" and "A-contains-B".

There are some *really* terrible programmers out there - and they
can write awful code in any language you care to provide them with.

But beware - there are people (I'm one of them) who have used all the
wonderous features of C++ and cooly *decided* not to use many of them.
It's a bad idea to label them all as people who havn't bothered to
learn more than C-with-classes - that's not always the case.

As a C programmer, I never once used a 'goto' and only rarely used
a 'comma operator'. Did that make me a bad C programmer?  I don't
think so.  Those are *dumb* language features that we don't need.
It's the same deal in C++. You have to know what makes you more
productive and what causes you to blow your leg off with alarming
regularity.  Templates, exceptions, stream I/O and multiple
inheritance are good examples of those things.

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
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