In defence of C (was:Re:Anybody else tried FreeBasic (aka fbc)?)

[John Vetterli]

On Fri, 7 Oct 2005, Walter Dnes wrote:
>  Working in C makes working in C seem like torture.  I tried.  It's
> string primitives are... primitive... beyond belief.  Any language where
> you risk buffer overflow simply reading or concatenating strings is
> b at dly b0rk3n.  Don't get me wrong; for programming to the bare metal,
> such as is required for writing an OS or a driver, C walks all over
> cpu-specific assembler, and is almost 100% portable between
> architectures.  It's supreme in that area, but it sucks at scientific or
> text-processing applications.  "Horses for courses", etc.

If you find there's a task that's difficult in C you can probably find a 
library to make it easier.  People writing text-processing applications 
aren't sticking to the string primitives.

There's also the speed issue: people writing scientific applications may 
want as much speed as possible for massive number-crunching.

JV
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