The Microsoft Fanboys would have bought a copy of Vista ages ago when it came out. The Linux Fanboys don't bother with buying copies anymore - why should they in the age of broadband? A fraction of the fraction of people who build their PCs from scratch buy OEM copies of Windows. The other 90% of computer users just use whatever was installed when they bought the box.
So how come they haven't got 98.5% of "boxed operating systems"? I think they're just massaging their figures so they don't look like Stalinist dictators...
> OP's paranoia about Brown not holding elections this year aside, the UK is still a democracy. However, it's still a police state -- a democratic police state in which the will/fears of the majority run roughshod over civil rights of those on the outskirts of society.
While it is true that they do occasionally have elections in the UK, calling the country a democracy is stretching the point: The upper house is completely unelected, and composed of a mixture of aristocrats (albeit very few now), bishops, and political appointees. But since i t has an oversight function, let's ignore that and focus on the main issue. The House of Commons is elected by a first past the post system which inherently ignores 50% of votes. Thanks to - deliberate or not - gerrymandering, it actually ignores a majority of voters, leading to the absurd, not to mention profoundly anti-democratic situation that the country is ruled by a party that had only 35.2% of the popular vote !
> The UK is in many ways what I fear the US becoming -- a country governed by fear of insecurity and a more orderly form of mob rule. Sadly I don't see the US as less paranoia driven than the UK. By the time you add the extra dash of ignorance that dominates US public life, your odds don't look much better than ours IMHO.
> I do not understand why the UK is allowing itself to deteriorate in such a fashion, With my cynical hat on: It's because the majority of people either don't understand or don't give a fuck.
> but it is appalling to outsiders who have to watch it happen. At the same time, I think it is fair to say that the same could be said, though to a lesser extent, about the U.S. Equally cynically: You have your human rights abuses, we have ours. Personally, I find them equally appalling. On balance though, I'd still rather get a two year sentence (in an open prison, out in 9 months on good behaviour) to being deported to Syria. Or being abducted ^H^H^H^H renditioned.
The vast majority of those are posix platforms, so even if there's no actively maintained port, it wouldn't be hard to get one going. The CPython core is simple, portable C. Of course it also runs on any (recent? - haven't checked) JVM and.Net, giving it another set of platforms. And on Symbian, rather more relevant then the old Psion stuff.
Not sure how your Python versions got entangled - strange things happen during OS upgrades - but I routinely have 2-3 different python versions installed on my systems w/o problems.
> Laptop users should never... ever... be storing files on the local drive > A better approach would be for all laptop users to do their work via Terminal Services.
That'll work really well since I have non-stop WiFi access on the train and tube for my daily commute. And nothing beats internet access on long-haul business trips!
> Blade servers are to mainframes as a pack of mice are to an elephant. I'm fairly sure my 400 blades run rings around any mainframe for what I do - floating point calculations.
Apart from that, go mainframe! As long as I don't have to get involved with it;)
> The rest, the internal Turkey matters as long as they stay out of EU, are their business and we have no right to mess with. You know that attitude explains so much of what's wrong with the world today.
If your neighbour is beating his wife, you wouldn't interfere either?
>I'm sure it didn't help at all that you worked in Saudi Arabia, Sigh.
>There is (as you know) no appeal process if your visa application is denied and US government employees do not have to justify why they denied an application, That is so bad on so many levels I can't even be bothered to start.
>I live in the EU. Technically, I can send goods, and especially money, from my own country to another in the union and not have to pay any customs or tarriffs. There is free trade of goods here. Unless they're goods that are punitively taxed in the destination country; e.g. tobacco and booxe.
>Technically, there is also free movement of people, but this is a sham. Even before the 9/11 hysteria began, you still needed a passport to go just about anywhere. Every time I travel in this suppossedly free union, I have to present my papers and declare my goods etc. That'd be a different EU than the rest of us live in then; I have very clear memories of driving from Sweden via Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France all the way to the channel tunnel without ever showing a passport. Or encountering a visible border crossing - it's motorway all the way, but occasionally the signs change colour and/or language. Of course the Brits opted out of Schengen, so they insist on keeping their border controls, but I could have driven to Gibraltar or even to Malta without a passport. Technically, there is also free movement of people, but this is a sham. Even before the 9/11 hysteria began, you still needed a passport to go just about anywhere. Every time I travel in this suppossedly free union, I have to present my papers and declare my goods etc. The stated purpose for these controls is protecting us from terrorism, immigration, criminals, etc, etc, etc. The reality is that government want to show that we only enter and leave countries by their say so. Plebs have no right of free travel. (Big businessmen and polititians on the other hand, regularly find themselves exempt from border controls). As for declaring goods, we bought the car in Sweden and drove it down, no declaration required. Still had to pay VAT on it in the UK, of course.
> The stated purpose for these controls is protecting us from terrorism, immigration, criminals, etc, etc, etc. Yeah, yeah, yeah, politicians lie, sun rises in the east - anything new?
> The reality is that government want to show that we only enter and leave countries by their say so. Plebs have no right of free travel. (Big businessmen and polititians on the other hand, regularly find themselves exempt from border controls). Actually you do have the right to travel - under the EU convention of human rights your government can't stop you from travelling except very specific circumstances. How that works legally with alleged football hooligans I admittedly don't know) Politicians - I have no idea about the protocol, but I agree that heads of state probably don't get their passports checked before they step on the red carpet. So?
> That is what passports and visas are for. The passport is a direct descendant of the lords chit, when back in the middle ages you needed your lords permission to leave his demense. My history of passports is rusty; I always thought it was the other way around - it's a request to let you enter another country, not leave your own. To this day the Queen personally asks whom it may concern to help her loyal subjects - or something like that. Check your passport.
> In modern times we have replaces "lord" with government, or in saudi arabia, "company". Passports do not exist to protect us. They exist to control us. Governments yearn for the day when every citizen must have their papers, when we are once again serfs for private companies. Dude, your paranoia about capitalism clashes with your paranoia about big brother! Jumping from judfing Saudi Arabia is evil, oppresive and corrupt to concluding all governments are the same is in the same league as claiming all doctors are sadistic mass murderers because Joseph Mengele was a doctor.
> Governments are beginning to share data in this way not because their own situation has changed, but because the situation of the companies people work for has changed. Companies are now global, and they need to move their loyal employees around with them,
> So the giving of addresses is partially irrelevant. Just having a database of addresses without the consent of the people who own the addresses may be illegal.
Having a database of personal information IS illegal in the UK unless you've registered it with the Data Protection commission or some such body. That should cover most spammers.
I'm sure there are exemptions for personal use, but you'll have trouble convincing the court that you have 235,000 close personal friends;)
Or, you could legalise weed, and make hard drugs available on prescription.
That would a) get you tax revenue on the 2nd most popular intoxicant in the country b) cut off a huge part of the funding of organised crime c) lead to a dramatic reduction in burglaries and muggings, since addicts wouldn't have to commit crime to feed their habits
and, most importantly, mean you have plenty of free jail space to detain spammers at Her Majesty's pleasure. Not sure if Liz has an email address, but if she does, I'm sure it'd please her to detain spammers for quite a while;)
>although there's a massive loophole in that once personal information is out of the UK ^UK^EU
Data protection laws are, AFAIK, reasonably uniform across the EU. And there are restrictions on what data you can transfer out, although there are plenty of loopholes in the transfer rules.
Did you sleep through the last few years when the whole world, including Bush & Blair, admitted that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 or Al-Quaeda?
> Many countries, such as Britain, criminalize witholding encryption keys from law enforcement to the extent that unless you are actually a terrorist with detailed and executable plans of action labeled 'evil plot' stupidly stored on your laptop, you are probably better off (in the criminal liability sense) just giving it to them
If you've done anything much more serious than nicking a mars bar, you're probably better off keeping your key secret. IIRC, the maximum sentence for not revealing it is two years, which means you're likely to serve less than a year - and quite possibly you'll be out of jail by the time your trial is finished because of the time you've spent in remand. Plus, whatever jailtime you do will be in a nice low security prison.
On top of that, you can claim to your friends and future employers that you were valiantly standing up for civil liberties. Sounds a much nicer prospect than ten to twenty in high security for your terrorist plot, having all your family's assets "recovered" by the government for money laundering, or being known as a nonce in jail (and sex-offender for the rest of your life) for being a pervert.
The law (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) is not just offensive, but also pointless. Not that anyone listens to me....:(
>Absolutely not. Now, giving water treatment facilities and facilities to produce vaccines, I don't think any aid agencies actually send tankers of water to Africa.
Vaccines are a slightlydifferent problem; there's only a handful of companies in the world that produce them, and it really doesn't make sense to create them locally. Even most western countries import their vaccines.
> But simply giving the people the things makes them dependent on you, Often a fair point; not the case with vaccines.
> which is what a lot of these organizations really want Somehow I doubt that.
> The banks where I have worked that have Internet access, usually have heavy filtering. I still have the find a bank that blocks my own domain and thus my own webmail service, but yeah, for n00bs it's probably hard to survive without hotmail, gmail and yahoo.
Just because you can work around the enforcement of the regulations doesn't mean you should. a) because the regulations are there for a reason b) because you signed up to them
> It was a no-brainer to put a cross-cable between my bank-desktop and my laptop c) Get caught, get fired.
Yes, you probably did it for an innocent reason that time, but how do we know you didn't burn the source code to nick it? (not that there's necessarily much source code worth nicking in the world;)
Get a 3G mobile, then you can read your email, browse the web without restrictions, AND keep your job;)
> Remember that you're talking about a guy who thinks that if something is designed correctly then it becomes stillborn
So that's why the whole world is programming in Simula, Smalltalk and Lisp;)
The key constraint in C++ design was maintaining backward compatibility with C. That was one of the key factors in its success, but also one of the key source for its problems.
> Noting in the C++ standard requires the language to be "unsafe".
Apart from the inclusion of the C standard library;)
> And it also just seems that the community of C++ users still remain more interested in the latest optimizing compilers and auto-vectorization capabilities, than in the safety-enhancing features. That's because the C++ community is slowly shrinking back to its core subset - people who need to write largescale, efficient and maintainable systems, and are willing to understand their tool properly. At least I hope so.
C++ has mainly been a victim of its own success: It isn't the perfect tool for writing every little corporate desktop application. But for a while every system was written in C++, whether the system or the people were suitable or not. Hence we're stuck with a lot of bad systems written by bad C++ programmers who dislike the language.
> The reason Java is simple is that it didn't try to be a multi-paradigm language, It's not that simple anymore.. but anyway, I've always hated having to create a fake class just to be able to have a main in Java.
> where the inevitable trade offs left C++ inadequate in every paradigm Err. No. Sorry. No, There, you have your unsubstantiated opinion, I have mine.
>Java was also well described in a decent specification rather than being standardised too late in the day as happened with C++. Well, that was because Java was pushed by a big company, whereas C++ grew fairly organically, and was adopted because people found it useful. Of course the language developed - I shudder what would have happened if they'd standardised it in '89 - but I agree, it would have been nice to have the standard a few years earlier. Hardly Bjarne's fault.
> There also exists a canonical Java test suite, whereas the C++ standard is littered with opportunities for implementation specific functionality, Having a test canonical test suite is obviously nice; equally obviously when you have a single company controlling the "standard". Standards developed through the ISO have a messier origin. As for the implementation specific functionality - most of that is actually inherited from C.
Again, compatibility with C was a choice; it was probably crucial to C++' success at the beginning, and may be more of a hindrance now. Java makes other choices - e.g. in floating points - which would have sunk C++ when it was developed.
> I can write efficient code for Sun's implementation of the STL that will generate multiple calls to the copy constructor in GNU STL when adding an object to a container. Neither STL version violates semantics as described in Stoustrup's book, it's just one of a vast number of implementation specific features that are allowed in an STL implementation.
Good for you; and my comiserations for having to deal with Sun's compilers. But if you still believe that Bjarne's books define the standard, you're so far behind the times that it's hard to take you seriously. Go and look at the standard, you'll find it complex but fairly unambiguous; implementation defined behaviour is quite rare, and usually exists for a good reason.
> No, but I struggle to think of a single instance where I have encountered C++ code that proved to be simpler, more maintainable or more efficient than the equivalent written in C, Perl or Java. Of the three large C++ based projects that I have become involved with, two were scrapped and replaced with a mix of C and Java.
My comiserations; you've clearly been unlucky in your choice of employers. There have been a lot of bad C++ projects, but the same can be said for most languages that have left the lab - I can certainly vouch for the Java on that count.
> The third is still proving to be a hindrance to those trying to maintain and extend it, so much so that a parallel system is evolving, largely written in Perl. You're not seriously suggesting that Perl is the way forward in ANY sense?
Slashdot Mirror
Who buys "boxed operating systems" these days?
The Microsoft Fanboys would have bought a copy of Vista ages ago when it came out.
The Linux Fanboys don't bother with buying copies anymore - why should they in the age of broadband?
A fraction of the fraction of people who build their PCs from scratch buy OEM copies of Windows.
The other 90% of computer users just use whatever was installed when they bought the box.
So how come they haven't got 98.5% of "boxed operating systems"? I think they're just massaging their figures so they don't look like Stalinist dictators...
> OP's paranoia about Brown not holding elections this year aside, the UK is still a democracy. However, it's still a police state -- a democratic police state in which the will/fears of the majority run roughshod over civil rights of those on the outskirts of society.
While it is true that they do occasionally have elections in the UK, calling the country a democracy is stretching the point:
The upper house is completely unelected, and composed of a mixture of aristocrats (albeit very few now), bishops, and political appointees. But since i t has an oversight function, let's ignore that and focus on the main issue.
The House of Commons is elected by a first past the post system which inherently ignores 50% of votes. Thanks to - deliberate or not - gerrymandering, it actually ignores a majority of voters, leading to the absurd, not to mention profoundly anti-democratic situation that the country is ruled by a party that had only 35.2% of the popular vote !
> The UK is in many ways what I fear the US becoming -- a country governed by fear of insecurity and a more orderly form of mob rule.
Sadly I don't see the US as less paranoia driven than the UK. By the time you add the extra dash of ignorance that dominates US public life, your odds don't look much better than ours IMHO.
> I do not understand why the UK is allowing itself to deteriorate in such a fashion,
With my cynical hat on: It's because the majority of people either don't understand or don't give a fuck.
> but it is appalling to outsiders who have to watch it happen. At the same time, I think it is fair to say that the same could be said, though to a lesser extent, about the U.S.
Equally cynically: You have your human rights abuses, we have ours. Personally, I find them equally appalling. On balance though, I'd still rather get a two year sentence (in an open prison, out in 9 months on good behaviour) to being deported to Syria. Or being abducted ^H^H^H^H renditioned.
> I am all for charity... of the voluntary type
:)
When did anyone come round and put a gun to your head to force you to donate anything?
Oh yes, you're on my list for next week Thursday. See you then, and keep your checkbook handy!
The vast majority of those are posix platforms, so even if there's no actively maintained port, it wouldn't be hard to get one going. The CPython core is simple, portable C. Of course it also runs on any (recent? - haven't checked) JVM and .Net, giving it another set of platforms. And on Symbian, rather more relevant then the old Psion stuff.
Not sure how your Python versions got entangled - strange things happen during OS upgrades - but I routinely have 2-3 different python versions installed on my systems w/o problems.
You could sue the Vatican - i.e. the state. You could sue the Pope, although you'd probably have to do it in the courts of the Vatican.
> Laptop users should never... ever... be storing files on the local drive
> A better approach would be for all laptop users to do their work via Terminal Services.
That'll work really well since I have non-stop WiFi access on the train and tube for my daily commute. And nothing beats internet access on long-haul business trips!
So the fact that MS still can't write a decent C++ compiler after 18 iterations is boost's fault?
Actually, they're almost decent now. And some parts of boost are a bit... esoteric. But on the whole it's a damn useful library.
As for template error messages... yes, they suck a bit. But after a while you grok them.
> Blade servers are to mainframes as a pack of mice are to an elephant.
I'm fairly sure my 400 blades run rings around any mainframe for what I do - floating point calculations.
Apart from that, go mainframe! As long as I don't have to get involved with it;)
Software RAID. Been running it for years for exactly that reason,
Maybe not suitable for high performance situations, but I've not found it slow.
i'm all for paying teachers more - teaching kids is a very important job and should attract the brightest.
in the meantime, environmental awareness and a concern for world humanity will do less damage than Ayn Rand though.
> The rest, the internal Turkey matters as long as they stay out of EU, are their business and we have no right to mess with.
You know that attitude explains so much of what's wrong with the world today.
If your neighbour is beating his wife, you wouldn't interfere either?
>I'm sure it didn't help at all that you worked in Saudi Arabia,
Sigh.
>There is (as you know) no appeal process if your visa application is denied and US government employees do not have to justify why they denied an application,
That is so bad on so many levels I can't even be bothered to start.
>I live in the EU. Technically, I can send goods, and especially money, from my own country to another in the union and not have to pay any customs or tarriffs. There is free trade of goods here.
Unless they're goods that are punitively taxed in the destination country; e.g. tobacco and booxe.
>Technically, there is also free movement of people, but this is a sham. Even before the 9/11 hysteria began, you still needed a passport to go just about anywhere. Every time I travel in this suppossedly free union, I have to present my papers and declare my goods etc.
That'd be a different EU than the rest of us live in then; I have very clear memories of driving from Sweden via Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France all the way to the channel tunnel without ever showing a passport. Or encountering a visible border crossing - it's motorway all the way, but occasionally the signs change colour and/or language. Of course the Brits opted out of Schengen, so they insist on keeping their border controls, but I could have driven to Gibraltar or even to Malta without a passport.
Technically, there is also free movement of people, but this is a sham. Even before the 9/11 hysteria began, you still needed a passport to go just about anywhere. Every time I travel in this suppossedly free union, I have to present my papers and declare my goods etc. The stated purpose for these controls is protecting us from terrorism, immigration, criminals, etc, etc, etc. The reality is that government want to show that we only enter and leave countries by their say so. Plebs have no right of free travel. (Big businessmen and polititians on the other hand, regularly find themselves exempt from border controls).
As for declaring goods, we bought the car in Sweden and drove it down, no declaration required. Still had to pay VAT on it in the UK, of course.
> The stated purpose for these controls is protecting us from terrorism, immigration, criminals, etc, etc, etc.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, politicians lie, sun rises in the east - anything new?
> The reality is that government want to show that we only enter and leave countries by their say so. Plebs have no right of free travel. (Big businessmen and polititians on the other hand, regularly find themselves exempt from border controls).
Actually you do have the right to travel - under the EU convention of human rights your government can't stop you from travelling except very specific circumstances. How that works legally with alleged football hooligans I admittedly don't know)
Politicians - I have no idea about the protocol, but I agree that heads of state probably don't get their passports checked before they step on the red carpet. So?
> That is what passports and visas are for. The passport is a direct descendant of the lords chit, when back in the middle ages you needed your lords permission to leave his demense.
My history of passports is rusty; I always thought it was the other way around - it's a request to let you enter another country, not leave your own. To this day the Queen personally asks whom it may concern to help her loyal subjects - or something like that. Check your passport.
> In modern times we have replaces "lord" with government, or in saudi arabia, "company". Passports do not exist to protect us. They exist to control us. Governments yearn for the day when every citizen must have their papers, when we are once again serfs for private companies.
Dude, your paranoia about capitalism clashes with your paranoia about big brother! Jumping from judfing Saudi Arabia is evil, oppresive and corrupt to concluding all governments are the same is in the same league as claiming all doctors are sadistic mass murderers because Joseph Mengele was a doctor.
> Governments are beginning to share data in this way not because their own situation has changed, but because the situation of the companies people work for has changed. Companies are now global, and they need to move their loyal employees around with them,
> So the giving of addresses is partially irrelevant. Just having a database of addresses without the consent of the people who own the addresses may be illegal.
;)
Having a database of personal information IS illegal in the UK unless you've registered it with the Data Protection commission or some such body. That should cover most spammers.
I'm sure there are exemptions for personal use, but you'll have trouble convincing the court that you have 235,000 close personal friends
Or, you could legalise weed, and make hard drugs available on prescription.
;)
That would
a) get you tax revenue on the 2nd most popular intoxicant in the country
b) cut off a huge part of the funding of organised crime
c) lead to a dramatic reduction in burglaries and muggings, since addicts wouldn't have to commit crime to feed their habits
and, most importantly, mean you have plenty of free jail space to detain spammers at Her Majesty's pleasure. Not sure if Liz has an email address, but if she does, I'm sure it'd please her to detain spammers for quite a while
>although there's a massive loophole in that once personal information is out of the UK
^UK^EU
Data protection laws are, AFAIK, reasonably uniform across the EU. And there are restrictions on what data you can transfer out, although there are plenty of loopholes in the transfer rules.
Did you sleep through the last few years when the whole world, including Bush & Blair, admitted that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 or Al-Quaeda?
Just curious... what else did you miss?
> Many countries, such as Britain, criminalize witholding encryption keys from law enforcement to the extent that unless you are actually a terrorist with detailed and executable plans of action labeled 'evil plot' stupidly stored on your laptop, you are probably better off (in the criminal liability sense) just giving it to them
:(
If you've done anything much more serious than nicking a mars bar, you're probably better off keeping your key secret. IIRC, the maximum sentence for not revealing it is two years, which means you're likely to serve less than a year - and quite possibly you'll be out of jail by the time your trial is finished because of the time you've spent in remand. Plus, whatever jailtime you do will be in a nice low security prison.
On top of that, you can claim to your friends and future employers that you were valiantly standing up for civil liberties. Sounds a much nicer prospect than ten to twenty in high security for your terrorist plot, having all your family's assets "recovered" by the government for money laundering, or being known as a nonce in jail (and sex-offender for the rest of your life) for being a pervert.
The law (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) is not just offensive, but also pointless. Not that anyone listens to me....
Es ist Zeit.
>Absolutely not. Now, giving water treatment facilities and facilities to produce vaccines,
I don't think any aid agencies actually send tankers of water to Africa.
Vaccines are a slightlydifferent problem; there's only a handful of companies in the world that produce them, and it really doesn't make sense to create them locally. Even most western countries import their vaccines.
> But simply giving the people the things makes them dependent on you,
Often a fair point; not the case with vaccines.
> which is what a lot of these organizations really want
Somehow I doubt that.
> The banks where I have worked that have Internet access, usually have heavy filtering. I still have the find a bank that blocks my own domain and thus my own webmail service, but yeah, for n00bs it's probably hard to survive without hotmail, gmail and yahoo.
;)
;)
Just because you can work around the enforcement of the regulations doesn't mean you should.
a) because the regulations are there for a reason
b) because you signed up to them
> It was a no-brainer to put a cross-cable between my bank-desktop and my laptop
c) Get caught, get fired.
Yes, you probably did it for an innocent reason that time, but how do we know you didn't burn the source code to nick it? (not that there's necessarily much source code worth nicking in the world
Get a 3G mobile, then you can read your email, browse the web without restrictions, AND keep your job
> Remember that you're talking about a guy who thinks that if something is designed correctly then it becomes stillborn
;)
So that's why the whole world is programming in Simula, Smalltalk and Lisp
The key constraint in C++ design was maintaining backward compatibility with C. That was one of the key factors in its success, but also one of the key source for its problems.
> Noting in the C++ standard requires the language to be "unsafe".
;)
Apart from the inclusion of the C standard library
> And it also just seems that the community of C++ users still remain more interested in the latest optimizing compilers and auto-vectorization capabilities, than in the safety-enhancing features.
That's because the C++ community is slowly shrinking back to its core subset - people who need to write largescale, efficient and maintainable systems, and are willing to understand their tool properly. At least I hope so.
C++ has mainly been a victim of its own success: It isn't the perfect tool for writing every little corporate desktop application. But for a while every system was written in C++, whether the system or the people were suitable or not. Hence we're stuck with a lot of bad systems written by bad C++ programmers who dislike the language.
> The reason Java is simple is that it didn't try to be a multi-paradigm language,
It's not that simple anymore.. but anyway, I've always hated having to create a fake class just to be able to have a main in Java.
> where the inevitable trade offs left C++ inadequate in every paradigm
Err. No. Sorry. No, There, you have your unsubstantiated opinion, I have mine.
>Java was also well described in a decent specification rather than being standardised too late in the day as happened with C++.
Well, that was because Java was pushed by a big company, whereas C++ grew fairly organically, and was adopted because people found it useful. Of course the language developed - I shudder what would have happened if they'd standardised it in '89 - but I agree, it would have been nice to have the standard a few years earlier. Hardly Bjarne's fault.
> There also exists a canonical Java test suite, whereas the C++ standard is littered with opportunities for implementation specific functionality,
Having a test canonical test suite is obviously nice; equally obviously when you have a single company controlling the "standard". Standards developed through the ISO have a messier origin. As for the implementation specific functionality - most of that is actually inherited from C.
Again, compatibility with C was a choice; it was probably crucial to C++' success at the beginning, and may be more of a hindrance now. Java makes other choices - e.g. in floating points - which would have sunk C++ when it was developed.
> I can write efficient code for Sun's implementation of the STL that will generate multiple calls to the copy constructor in GNU STL when adding an object to a container. Neither STL version violates semantics as described in Stoustrup's book, it's just one of a vast number of implementation specific features that are allowed in an STL implementation.
Good for you; and my comiserations for having to deal with Sun's compilers. But if you still believe that Bjarne's books define the standard, you're so far behind the times that it's hard to take you seriously. Go and look at the standard, you'll find it complex but fairly unambiguous; implementation defined behaviour is quite rare, and usually exists for a good reason.
> No, but I struggle to think of a single instance where I have encountered C++ code that proved to be simpler, more maintainable or more efficient than the equivalent written in C, Perl or Java. Of the three large C++ based projects that I have become involved with, two were scrapped and replaced with a mix of C and Java.
My comiserations; you've clearly been unlucky in your choice of employers. There have been a lot of bad C++ projects, but the same can be said for most languages that have left the lab - I can certainly vouch for the Java on that count.
> The third is still proving to be a hindrance to those trying to maintain and extend it, so much so that a parallel system is evolving, largely written in Perl.
You're not seriously suggesting that Perl is the way forward in ANY sense?