Getting the word to conventional programmers

[beliavsky at aol.com]

Advocates of languages and programming methodologies sometimes compare
the current version of their favorite language to an old version of
their disfavored language, resulting in skewed comparisons. For
example, Conway writes

"Interpreted languages do two things much better than compiled
languages.

Firstly, they provide more sophisticated programming tools and support
for more advanced programming techniques. For example, Perl provides
hashed look-up tables and arbitrary-length arrays as core data types. C
doesn't even have a proper string type. Likewise, Perl's data sorting
facilities are integrated into the language, so the sorting criteria
are directly programmable.

Having all the basic tools of programming (i.e. high-level data types
and common algorithms) built into the language, rather than having to
build them yourself, means that you need to write less code to solve a
given problem."

I think most of the advanced programming techniques he mentions are
part of the C++ Standard Library.