Re: heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeellllllllllllllppppppppppppppppppppp

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Ada-class languages aren't bad, although they lack a lot of good OO capabilities; an OO
language with Ada's strong type-checking would be good. I worked in an Ada-class language
in the 1980s, and wrote a really wonderful storage allocator that belied the observation
that you can't write a storage allocator in a strongly-typed language without going
completely unsafe (in fact, after recoding the "prototype" storage allocator into three
levels of highly type-safe code, I couldn't get the code to compile! It turns out that
the problem was a design error in the original allocator, which allocated four times as
much memory as needed! In the type-safe allocator, this wouldn't even compile...) There
were only two tiny holes punched into the type system: one at the lowest level, to get at
machine words, and one at the API interface, to convert a storage block pointer to the
desired type [the 'new' function equivalent was a generic]. Everything else was
type-safe.

C# and Java are very type-safe as well, from what I've seen of them. Algol-68 and
Simula-67 were two others. Unfortunately, since I left the academic environment in 1981,
except for three years in industrial research and development, I've not had the exposure
to serious type-safe languages that I once had. But I consider C/C++ to be very weak
languages. The confusion about boolean types, and the misuse and abuse of integers and
pointers as integers, not to mention the ability to overwrite memory trivially, are pretty
good examples of major weakness in a language. We won't even go into the union type...
joe

On Sun, 5 Feb 2006 00:59:05 +0530, "Vipin [MVP]" <Vipin@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Good programming habits are essential, especially in weak languages like
C/C++.

Out of curiosity, Which is the Strongest language for you?
Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm
.

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