map vs. list-comprehension

[Roy Smith]

Scott David Daniels  <Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org> wrote:
>Roy Smith wrote:
>> Look at what happened to C when it mutated into C++.  In isolation, most of 
>> the features of C++ seem like good ideas.  Taken together, it's a huge 
>> hairy mess that most people only understand increasingly larger subsets of.  
>> Fred Brooks called it the second system syndrome.
>
>If you read "The Design and Evolution of C++" by Stroustrupp, you can
>see how most of current C++ is a direct result of its initial design
>requirements, not an aglomeration of features, each of which is a "good
>idea."  I take from the resulting big hairy mess that the design goals
>themselves are at fault for the big hairy mess.

I havn't read the book, but, wasn't the whole STL dropped into place
quite late, long after the basic language design was done?  There's a
fair amount of hair in the STL.

I thought exceptions and the myriad of cast operators were latecomers
to the party too.  Or is it simply that some compilers didn't support
those features (or support them well) until recently?

I've heard some people say that one of the reasons C++ is such a mess
is because it had to retain backwards compatability with C.  I don't
buy that.  There's nothing in the miserably complex class inheritance,
polymorphism, access control, argument defaulting machinery that
harkens back to C.  There's nothing about template error messages that
don't fit on a single screen that harkens back to C.  About the only
major problem which I can see that traces to C is the memory
management.