> C++ code not maintained by the original developer seems to end up
> unmaintained almost always.
"90% of _everything_ is crap." -- Sturgeon's Law
"...but 95% of everything written in C++ is crap."
--- Ted's specialization of Sturgeon's Law
Considering the age of groff, I suspect that its design is based only
on the language of cfront 2.0, or maybe even cfront 1.2. Compared to
ANSI C++, those are stone knives and bearskins.
C: A circular saw.
C++: Think of it as a circular saw with the safety removed --- it's more
powerful that way. :-)
"ANSI C++: It's not your father's C++."
Yes, ANSI C++ has even more rope with which you can hang yourself.
For example, the ability to overload the comma operator. Now there's a
dangerous language feature for people to misuse....
It's ironic, really. One of the claimed features of C++ is that it has
ways of enforcing abstractions by not allowing programmers to access
private class variables. The basic concept is that you don't trust
programmers enough to honor abstraction boundaries, so you have to
forcibly restrict them from touching them. (As opposed to simply
putting a comment in the header file saying, "keep your ugly paws off").
Yet C++ is filled with plenty of language features which are absolutely
lethal in the hands of an unskilled programmer --- the same programmer
which earlier we had assumed we couldn't trust not to touch a structure
member he shouldn't, so we had to make it private or protected.
So if the programmer is not trusted to honor abstraction boundaries,
explain to me again why we trust him not to misuse one of the large
number of some inherently dangerous language features with which C++ is
littered?
- Ted
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/