Subject: Cutting edge C and C++

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2000 17:44:12 +0200

I always find strange how committees do the presumptuous thing of taking
a good language, designed by one person, and decide that they can do it better.

ANSI did a good job on Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's C, though they
stole most of the good ideas from Bjarne Stroustrup (who designed C). As
some of you may have heard, they also came up with a new standard, C99,
which steals even more features from C++ (and reportedly, also from Fortran
;)). Unfortunately ISO's standard is very complicated and expensive to come
by (see http://www.advogato.org/person/jsm28/ for an anecdote), so I was
looking for a short, free, introduction to the new features in C99, and found

	http://www.freshsources.com/dev/Forums/C99/

which I would recommend to people interested in the future of C.

I'm not sure what to say about what happened to C++ from 1985 (when the first
edition of Stroustrup's book appeared) to the present (4th ("special") edition).
If I remember correctly, the first edition introduced C++ as a "C with
classes". The second edition (in 1991) added multiple inheritance, templates
and exceptions (as well as a lot of "philosophy"). The third edition (1997)
added namespaces and a standard library, which corresponded to the new ANSI
standard. The latest ("special") edition added a couple of not very important
chapters (on locales and exception safety). So during the standartization
of C++, it somehow accumulated a huge mass, becoming monsterous in size and
feature count (the latest edition of Stroustrup's book has about 5 times the
number of pages that his original book had). Is this a good thing? A bad
thing? I don't know... Certainly the standard, modern, C++, is a very powerful
and convenient language - but isn't it becoming a bit too complex? I'm sure
many programmers that program in "C++" don't know half of its features...

Anyway, if anyone doesn't have a book about the latest C++ standard library
(stroustrup's 3rd editions and above are ok, but lacks some important
implementation details, in my opinion), I recommend SGI's STL page, at
http://www.sgi.com/Technology/STL/.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Sunday, Dec 17 2000, 20 Kislev 5761
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |The road to good intentions is paved
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |with hell.

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2000 20:40:41 +0200

On Sun, Dec 17, 2000, I wrote about "[hackers-il] Cutting edge C and C++":
>...
>...

Sorry for the typo - Bjarne Stroustrup designed C++, not C, of course :)

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Sunday, Dec 17 2000, 21 Kislev 5761
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |If Barbie is so popular, why do you have
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |to buy her friends?