negative integer division

[Grant Edwards]

On 2005-02-09, Jive Dadson <jdadson at yahoo.com> wrote:

>>>> [C] isn't - it's a portable assembler.
>>>
>>> I've heard that many times, but it makes no sense to me.
>> 
>> I think the point is that C is a low-level, hardware twiddling
>> language to be used by people writing things like kernel code --
>
> And Python interpreters?

No. That's my point.  C isn't a good language in which to write
user applications such as a Python language.  One uses C when
the other choice is assembly, not when the other choice is
"real" high level language like Python, or Modula-3, or
Smalltalk, or whatever.

>> The fact that C ended up in the rather inappropriate role of
>> a user-land application language is different problem.
>
> In the early 80's, either C was the "appropriate language" or
> there was none ... and that's coming from someone who wrote a
> commercial Pascal compiler, runtime support, and debugger. I
> did it all in C. Pascal, as we all know, was ill-conceived.

I never thought so.  I did embedded systems development using
Pascal and quite enjoyed it.  Later when Pascal waned and C
waxed, I thought C was a definite step backwards.  I thought
Modula-2 and Modula-3 were both good languages as well.  

> C++ was a momentous advance,

Now C++ _was_ ill-conceived.  It's more of an agglomeration of
features than Perl.  And dangerous to boot: at least Perl tries
to protect you from memory leaks and stray pointers.

> but it intensionally inherited many of C's warts.

And added a bunch of it's own.

This is pretty much completely off-topic now.  :)

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  I'm definitely not
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