Can anyone recomend a good intoduction to C...

[Grant Griffin]

In article <o9up6.1291$y6.235469 at ruti.visi.com>, grante at visi.com says...
>
>In article <983967284.246700 at newsmaster-04.atnet.at>, Werner Schiendl wrote:
>
>>> > That is of course a point, if you need to let the program
>>> > inspect you will try to keep it as simple as possible. But
>>> > given the same functionality, I think a C++ program will not be
>>> > more complex.
>>>
>>> The program will not be, the language is.  It's a hard-to-judge
>>> tradeoff.
>>
>>As to my knowledge, the application itself is inspected for
>>safety critical appliances. And you must not change anything
>>afterwards in the software or you need to re-inspect the
>>software.
>>
>>What use would it be to check the language?
>
>The point is that the more complex the language, the more
>difficult it is to inspect the application.  You can look at a
>few lines of C and have a pretty good chance at guessing what
>they do.  In C++ it's much harder to look at snippet of code
>and figure out what it's going to do.

To me, that's more an indictment of OO programming than C++.  OO programming is 
useful primarily for creating complex programs--which, by definition, are hard
to figure out in just a few lines.  Given familiarity with OO concepts, and
familiarity with one's favorite OO language, the exact syntax of the language
doesn't matter all that much.  Although Python's approach to OO certainly is
simpler and cleaner than C++'s, I don't find much difference in the difficulty
of reading OO code in the two; instead, most of the difficulty of reading OO
code boils down to understanding the underlying algorithms and data structures.

OTOH, the more semantic "punch" a language offers, the harder it can be to read,
per line.  My experience with Python has been that I generally write fewer lines
of code than I would in C or C++, but my code takes more effort per line to
write.  There certainly is a net gain, but it isn't an order of magnitude.  Or,
as Fred Brooks puts it, "There's no magic bullet": most of the hard work of
programming will remain, no matter what languages or tools we use.

though-python-makes-for-a-better-aesthetic-experience-ly y'rs,

=g2

_____________________________________________________________________

Grant R. Griffin                                       g2 at dspguru.com
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