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angelbob · 03-31-2003, 09:39 PM

Thought of in precisely this way, yes. It came as rather a surprise to me at the time, and I had to do a great deal of explaining to the other (professional, highly-educated) C++ programmers I was working with. They hadn't bothered to learn how C++ does its magic at a bitwise level, so ugly little artifacts like this were entirely unintuitive to them. I have yet to see a book on C++ that provides the required background to make any sense of this, in fact. Given that multiple inheritance and typecasting are both quite standard features and are in essentially every C++ book, I consider that an interesting commentary on whether adding features is basically benign.

Well, yes. If it had any more flexibility or genericity in those areas (colloquially: "did it right"), you'd have to call it a dynamic or functional language.

My coming up with that has a lot to do with your arguments about adding features always being a good thing (unless they prevent adding other features) and your claiming that adding features only adds to the expressiveness of a language so I'm obviously being fascist by disagreeing with the use of any feature.

So yes, you *do* know where I came up with that. We've been having this same argument in minor variations for awhile now. But you told me what I needed to know to lose interest. More on that in a second.

Here we go! You're not interested in how badly other people abuse C++ because you don't work with other people regularly and you don't particularly want to. Okay, I'm jiggy with it. Since I have *very* few projects where I don't work with others or plan to in the future, this explains about all I need to know. As I say, "enough to lose interest" :-)

I'm familiar with what you're talking about, and what you did isn't that. For instance: I claimed that C was different from C++ in that a single person will much more commonly know all of C to an extreme degree (John did, I do, I've met others that do), thus enabling somebody to reasonably debug a random sample of code using all language features. Speaking as a former Teaching Assistant who debugged code in a Computer Graphics class, I'm glad we used little or no C++ since I had to read arbitrary code from questionable coders to do that job.

But yes, if you'd stated some assumptions and the principle you were extending, it would be similar. Done crudely, as you did there, it's just mockery. You're welcome to do it, but calling it logic is pretty silly.

Sure, but that's pretty irrelevant to whether it breaks the type system.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by the whole "not reassignable" thing here. You can reassign a variable which holds a reference to instead hold another reference in Java, LPC, Dylan, Perl and CommonLISP. Which language were you thinking of?

And references aren't always valid, at least in LPC, CommonLISP, Dylan, Perl and (I think) Java, all of which have a NULL value or the equivalent.

You've got me on the Chinese/English thing. Those do tend to be alternated rapidly and constantly by native speakers. Languages borrowing individual phrases from each other and having minor spillover actually *supports* my point -- instead of taking the fully-expressive union of the two languages, they take one of the less-expressive components and timidly add little extra bits of expressiveness to it. Pretty silly if more expressive was always better.

This is the other reason I've lost interest. I'd thought you were suggesting it for him, not for you. What you do by yourself is your business, in pretty much every sense :-P

Roughly. I believe that a programmer of average competence should be able to write very usable, pretty debuggable code, and a programmer of high competence (but not utterly brilliant) should be able to write good, usable, debuggable code. This should be true even if using a fair subset of the language features since the overlap of any five programmers is likely to use the vast majority of the features of a given language -- even Perl :-)

True. I agree entirely. I just don't care about that as an excuse since I already have a perfectly good language that is 100% compatible with C :-)

Okay. Unless we raise a new topic (or you'd like some very specific question addressed), I think I'm done with this thread.

03-31-2003, 09:39 PM	#41
angelbob Member Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: Bay Area, CA, USA Posts: 39	Thought of in precisely this way, yes. It came as rather a surprise to me at the time, and I had to do a great deal of explaining to the other (professional, highly-educated) C++ programmers I was working with. They hadn't bothered to learn how C++ does its magic at a bitwise level, so ugly little artifacts like this were entirely unintuitive to them. I have yet to see a book on C++ that provides the required background to make any sense of this, in fact. Given that multiple inheritance and typecasting are both quite standard features and are in essentially every C++ book, I consider that an interesting commentary on whether adding features is basically benign. Well, yes. If it had any more flexibility or genericity in those areas (colloquially: "did it right"), you'd have to call it a dynamic or functional language. My coming up with that has a lot to do with your arguments about adding features always being a good thing (unless they prevent adding other features) and your claiming that adding features only adds to the expressiveness of a language so I'm obviously being fascist by disagreeing with the use of any feature. So yes, you do know where I came up with that. We've been having this same argument in minor variations for awhile now. But you told me what I needed to know to lose interest. More on that in a second. Here we go! You're not interested in how badly other people abuse C++ because you don't work with other people regularly and you don't particularly want to. Okay, I'm jiggy with it. Since I have very few projects where I don't work with others or plan to in the future, this explains about all I need to know. As I say, "enough to lose interest" :-) I'm familiar with what you're talking about, and what you did isn't that. For instance: I claimed that C was different from C++ in that a single person will much more commonly know all of C to an extreme degree (John did, I do, I've met others that do), thus enabling somebody to reasonably debug a random sample of code using all language features. Speaking as a former Teaching Assistant who debugged code in a Computer Graphics class, I'm glad we used little or no C++ since I had to read arbitrary code from questionable coders to do that job. But yes, if you'd stated some assumptions and the principle you were extending, it would be similar. Done crudely, as you did there, it's just mockery. You're welcome to do it, but calling it logic is pretty silly. Sure, but that's pretty irrelevant to whether it breaks the type system. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by the whole "not reassignable" thing here. You can reassign a variable which holds a reference to instead hold another reference in Java, LPC, Dylan, Perl and CommonLISP. Which language were you thinking of? And references aren't always valid, at least in LPC, CommonLISP, Dylan, Perl and (I think) Java, all of which have a NULL value or the equivalent. You've got me on the Chinese/English thing. Those do tend to be alternated rapidly and constantly by native speakers. Languages borrowing individual phrases from each other and having minor spillover actually supports my point -- instead of taking the fully-expressive union of the two languages, they take one of the less-expressive components and timidly add little extra bits of expressiveness to it. Pretty silly if more expressive was always better. This is the other reason I've lost interest. I'd thought you were suggesting it for him, not for you. What you do by yourself is your business, in pretty much every sense :-P Roughly. I believe that a programmer of average competence should be able to write very usable, pretty debuggable code, and a programmer of high competence (but not utterly brilliant) should be able to write good, usable, debuggable code. This should be true even if using a fair subset of the language features since the overlap of any five programmers is likely to use the vast majority of the features of a given language -- even Perl :-) True. I agree entirely. I just don't care about that as an excuse since I already have a perfectly good language that is 100% compatible with C :-) Okay. Unless we raise a new topic (or you'd like some very specific question addressed), I think I'm done with this thread.