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Stroustrup Says New C++ Standard Delayed Until 2010 Or Later
wandazulu writes "At the end of an article written by the creator of C++, where he talks about removing a feature from the new C++ standard, he drops a bombshell: The new C++ standard (typically referred to as C++0x) has been delayed until 2010 or later. What does this mean? No new C++ features like threads, proper enum classes, or hash tables. C++0x is dead, long live C++1x!"
"C++0x... Yes, well, that just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?"
Well, it does if you just pronounce it "Cocks".
The latest version of Cobol (eagerly expected by 6 people) will also be delayed till January 2011.
Or a crowbar for anybody who thinks languages make things automatically safe.
If you are a good programmer, you can do safe programs in C++ or any other language.
If you are a bad programmer, you can't do that in C++ or any other language.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
The headline completely misses the central part of the article and focuses on a very minor point. Everyone has known for quite a while that C++0x would actually be C++1x. There's only a few months left in 2009, so there's absolutely no surprise there. The real meat of the article is that support for "concepts", a key (and arguably the most anticipated) part of C++0x, is being dropped. That's a major disappointment to many people, including Stroustrup.
With that definition of good programmer, are there in fact any good programmers?
"Give me six lines of C++ code written by the most competent programmer, and I will find enough in there to hang him."
If you are a good programmer, you can do safe programs in C++ or any other language.
So it must just be that there are no good programmers. Because I haven't seen any safe web browsers, word processors, or PDF readers.
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
No new C++ features like threads, proper enum classes, or hash tables
Cause one thing C++ sure doesn't have is enough features, right?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I've been following C++0x for a long time now, and have been looking forward to it, but now I'm not so sure I'll ever use it. I was looking forward to Concepts more than anything and with that gone, it seems like a extremely minor upgrade. Also, even when the spec does come out, how many years before we can trust that most compilers can use it effectively... two, three? Then after we've been using it for a while, how long before books come out that tell us that we've been using it all wrong and we have to start over (ie: the Exceptional " " and Effective " " books from Sutter and Meyers)?
Okay, so I can use C++0x well in 10 years, okay I'll probably be so burned out by then I'll be a manager, or I will have convinced someone to let us use D for embedded work and something managed for everything else.
"We need a fourth law of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife"
Or better yet- take the crowbar and whack programmers who can't write in C++ until they leave the industry.
Because C++ is the pinnacle of programming knowledge? *giggle*
If you can't understand memory allocation and pointers, you aren't competent to be in this profession.
Just because one can understand memory allocations and pointers doesn't mean one wants to have to deal with them manually in all their programs. There is a reason why there are auto_ptrs in C++ and it's not because those people are "noobs", it's because people want to actually spend their time writing the program rather than having their time eaten up by writing tons of boilerplate memory management code.
C++ can't be fixed by adding features.
C++ can only be fixed by removing features.
My minivan won't get me to Jamaica, so I need to add wings or pontoons? Or maybe I should buy an airline ticket instead?
Use the right tool for the job. Sticking another bag on the side of a language that's almost entirely bags isn't going to fix it. If you need a better language than C++, maybe you shouldn't be using C++.
There are two basic problems with your code. First, there are unbalanced parenthesis. Second, this is a thread about C++. Not Perl. Next time, be more careful. Thanks.
Some years ago, the C++ committee went off into template la-la land. Most of the work there focuses on template features that will be used by few, and used correctly by fewer.
Templates are useful, but "generic programming", doing arbitrary computation at compile time with templates, was a terrible idea. Templates can be abused as a recursive term-rewriting system, and through some clever and obscure tricks, recursive computations can be run at compile time. As a programming language, this trick is awful; awful from a syntax point of view, awful from an understandability point of view, and awful from a debugging point of view. If you need to do work at compile time, there have been much better approaches. LISP "macros" were standard LISP, not a second language. And even they created such a mess that Scheme had to be invented to clean out the language.
Orignally, templates were conceived as a saner way to do what C programmers did with macros, providing a way to have some type independence at compile time. But the template crowd got out of control.
The obsession with templates has led to a neglect of things C++ really needed, like better memory safety (C++ still has buffer overflows, and most of the security holes today stem from this), and better approaches to concurrency (the compiler has no idea what locks what, and it needs to know). Anything that wasn't template-related tended to be ignored by the committee.
The result of this failure has been C++ spinoffs - Java, C#, etc. Even Objective C has made a comeback in the Apple world. C++ has never even been able to displace C, twenty years on.
I've written a lot of C++, and I'm disgusted with this mess.
The problem is the amount of C programmers/thinkers who think they're writing C++ just because they type "class". It doesn't work that way, C++ is a totally different language.
eg. If you're Doing It Right then it's impossible to get a "buffer overflow" in C++. Most of the exploits you see are down to buffer overflows so I leave you to draw your own conclusions about the programmers.
Problems with C++ that will catch C programmers:
No sig today...
I think bigger problems are C++'s complexity, the presence of pointers, the use of include files, and the lack of garbage collection.
Funny - I see all of those things as advantages.
Back in the day they used to have little children crawling around under cotton stipping machines. The children were needed to pick up fluff and other debris that would cause the machine to break the thread it was working on. Some children would get crushed in the machine because they weren't fast enough to get out of the way etc.
C++ is a bit like that machine. It works fine if you have the luxury of being able to pick only the fastest most able children but there comes a time when you need to grow your business beyond the limits of what the best can achieve. At that point you need to either accept that some of the less able children will get crushed (bugs in the code) or you need to make the machine safer. It's often cheaper and simpler to make the machine safer and hopefully those most able children will then be able to perform more complex and hopefully profitable work.
To paraphrase... everytime you argue for a language without safety features god kills a child.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.