In the Spirit of C

(via Keith Devens)

In the Spirit of C, by Greg Colvin.

A somewhat biased and over enthusiastic overview of the evolution of C and ilk.

I am sure LtU readers will find a lot they disagree with. I suggest starting with the quote from the ANSI C Rationale...

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Dubious Quote

I kind of liked this aside:

real programmers can write FORTRAN in any language

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? ;-)

Double-edged quote

Indeed, here's FORTRAN in Hebrew: פורטרן

:-(

So easy to become a real programmer... So long job security ;-)

The Two Things

For some reason, this reminds me of one of the responses in an article about The Two Things:

Software is easy except for the special cases.

Unfortunately, stopping and starting are special cases.

OT: Commenting on posts

Ehud, I've noticed that your comments appear to be made on the top level, rather than beneith the actual post that you comment on.

With the new superior presentation engine in LtU (which does indent the posts according to their tree depth), could I ask whether it is intentional?

Mea culpa

I don't always remember to click the "reply to this comment" link. Sorry.

"D" can infer template types?

There's a note from the editor in there that implies that D has a more convenient template syntax.

From what I've read, it seems like D's syntax is the most cumbersome of all because template parameter types aren't inferred when invoking a template function. Am I mistaken?

AFAICT no.

When I was involved with D (and the documentation still says so) you had to explicit instantiate a template and always mention it (because templates are namespaces too). So a template function isn't invoked, instead you have to deal with the explicit instances.