Third public review of X3J11 C (a scientist speaks up)

[Rahul Dhesi]

In article <887 at l.cc.purdue.edu> cik at l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
[wish list for HLLs]

I agree that many of the features wished for ought to be in higher-
level languages.  But to put all of them in C would no longer leave
the relatively small, simple, low-level language that C was designed
to be.

Nearly all of the features that Herman Rubin wishes to see *are*
already in HLLs, only not all are in each HLL.  C++ has some.  Ada has
*many* of them, especially fixed point arithmetic and functions
returning structured values.

The real problem is not with C designers.  The real problem is with
Fortran designers, who have always had an explicit mandate to design a
language for scientific computing, and have continued to fail miserably
to achieve this.  In a way the C users who do numerical computing want
to put on C the burden that Fortran was supposedly designed to carry.

The trouble with doing so is that other users will lose.  Each new
feature added to a language increases the complexity of the language
translator, and *all* users, even those who don't need to use these
features, will pay in money, disk space, and CPU time.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi