Help a C++ coder see the light

[Ville Vainio]

mark.charsley at REMOVE_THIS.radioscape.com (Mark Charsley) wrote in message news:<memo.20030130181135.820C at a.radioscape.com>...

> As far as I can tell, the only way to have the same confidence in ones 
> code as you'd get with C++ (albeit using code that might take you a lot 

You have confidence in the code you write in C++? Now that's what I
call misplaced optimism...

Seriously though, even though the error you mention might require
extra testing, at least the errors can be fixed immediately when they
occur. When my C++ program crashes (in production environment w/o 
debugging tools), I get annoyed because I know I have to try to
replicate the error and tighten the logging to pin down the location.
When a Python program crashes (which it does, instead of happily
continuing after writing garbage to adjacent memory buffer), I'm happy
because I have found and immediately squashed yet another bug. There
is no need for heavy debugging machinery, someone just sends you a
traceback via email or whatever.

> However there are large programs out there written in python, so it 
> obviously can be done. So are folks here just preternaturally good 

When my python programs get bigger, I feel more and more happy that
the program is indeed in Python, not C++. One tends to write more OO
code in Python, while in C++ programming in OO style is awkward, which
tends to increase the amount of lazy hacks that harm the growth
potential of the program. You can also totally ignore many security
considerations of large bodies of C/C++ code (buffer overflows).