Re: What has C++ become?
On Jun 2, 4:05 pm, ytrem...@nyx.nyx.net (Yannick Tremblay) wrote:
In article <BfCdnUj63_iCVt7VnZ2dnUVZ_vSdn...@comcast.com>,
Walter Bright <wal...@digitalmars-nospamm.com> wrote:
Juha Nieminen wrote:
Maybe you think using <> makes template code "a mess"? I don't
understand why.
It's because of the parsing ambiguities that come from using < > as a
parameter delimiter.
Is this somehow unclear:
std::vector<int> table;
table.push_back(5);
What's so unclear about that? I think it's perfectly clear
and legible code. How else would you want it to be?
It's the wordiness of it. If the code gets more complicated
than such trivial examples, it gets rather hard to visualize.
I would want it to use a much more compact notation, like
maybe:
int[] table;
table ~= 5;
The problem with compact notation is that they can only fill a very
small number of cases.
The problem with compact notation is that it quickly leads to
obfuscation. Witness perl and APL. Many of the problems with
C++ today is that there was an attempt to make the notation too
compact in the past. Things like:
int*p;
int a[10];
rather than:
variable p: pointer to int ;
variable a: array[ 10 ] of int ;
The result is a declaration syntax which causes untold problems,
not just to human readers, but also to compilers.
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