Re: AGT Version 1.83
15 Aug 1995 17:02:08 GMT
In article <40phid$82c@nic.lth.se>, mol@marvin.df.lth.se says...
>
>In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.950813160611.3331E-100000@xmission.xmission.com>,
>Nicholas Gorrell <nick@xmission.xmission.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>On 11 Aug 1995, Joe Schlimgen wrote:
>>
>>> The biggest problems I had to worry about were strings and arrays. Pascal
can
>>> base arrays from [min..max] and C++ always bases them from 0 -- hence the
>>> PArray<class T, int min, int max> template. Strings were a bit trickier --
the
>>> ANSI string class works well, but I hade to work on the i/o to make it
>>> fixed-length (which Pascal appears to have -- more research is needed
there,
>>> any answers from the vast and unpaid research dept?).
>>
>>Pascal DOES NOT have fixed length strings, strings are kinda like arrays,
>>this is how it works:
>
>That depends entirely on which dialect of Pascal you're using.
>
[snip]
>
>One of the reasons C programmers flame Pascal so much is that Wirth
>made it a fairly minimal language by cutting out a lot of features,
>without any real possibility of providing that functionality in a
>library (as it's done in C, which is also a minimalistic language). He
>seemed to reason that we don't need real strigns, when we can simulate
>them with arrays of charaters, we don't need real file IO when we can
>simulate it with sequential streams, and so on. As a result, the
>language as defined by Wirth is quite clumsy for real programming.
Please do not think that I was flaming Pascal. What I did is point to a
difference between C++ and Pascal that was tricky to port from Pascal to C++
(especially since I did not fully understand what was really happening).
Actually, (Turbo) Pascal has some features that I really like and it's
dissapointing that I can't port them directly (or, in some cases, indirectly)
into C++. Each language has its pros and cons, and no one language can be
_everything_ to all programmers or projects. Languages wars are pointless.
[snip]
>
>
>Magnus