Go read the papers at the C++ ISO Standard homepage. Module systems have been proposed well before/. got around to bitching and whining, and many of the ideas in your post were taken into account. Something is already in the works.
Remember that, when the language syntax was designed, the idea was that every conforming C program would also be a conforming "C With Classes" program. Identifiers like "abstract" and "interface" were already in use as user variables, types, functions, etc.
I think you would be pretty pissed off if the next revision of your dawn-to-disk programming language suddenly made "foo" or "i" a reserved keyword.:-)
Time has passed and the two languages no longer fit together like that. Hell, they barely resemble each other anymore. But even ignoring C, now there are valid C++ programs which use "abstract" and "interface" as identifiers, so the problem remains.
By far the best book I've ever seen for beginners, or relative beginners, is Accelerated C++. The authors have been involved in C++ since its inception and have been teaching it ever since as well.
And when off-target testing does expose a problem (not necessarily a bug) in the proposed patch?
Then it's brought up on the list and discussed. They're handled on a case-by-case basis. If we need access to the hardware in question, we ask for it. (Usually the person reporting the on-target problem has already volunteered.)
Your argument holds only as long as you ignore cross-compilers... which by a useful coincidence happens to be the major strong point of the project being discussed.:-)
We require that patches which might affect a particular platform be tested by building a cross-compiler for that platform, and then running regressions tests. Some tests are looking at the generated assembly, some of them try to "run" the code if you have a simulator installed.
It's rather rare that the code needs to be executed on actual hardware to expose a bug in a proposed patch.
All of what dvdeug says here is true. I've done more than watch the list, I'm a maintainer, and David Edelsohn (an IBM employee) has always been willing to work with the GCC community. He even pushes the IBM developers and management to make each release of AIX slightly less bizzare than the previous release.
Ulrich simply insults you if you disagree with him. He does not participate on the GCC lists; when he does send a message, it's a flame. I've never seen an explanatory email from him, on any topic.
If you (the general "you", not specifically Alioth) ever wonder why we occasionally seem to not care about y'all's complaints, this is largely it. We can either get bitched at by you, or we can get bitched at by that other guy, but since neither you nor he contribute to the code, to the bug testing, or even to the discussion, it's all the same to us: inevitable undifferentiated noise. It's not official GCC policy, it's just how it works out.
Now, complaints from people who are actually making an effort to help -- those get our attention, awfully damn' fast.
Douglas Adams wrote multiple versions of the screenplay, including the one used in the movie. The "new" characters, such as the one played by John Malkovich (sp?), were added by Adams specifically for the movie.
If Adams wrote it, grilling the producer about it seems pointless.
Also, fans of the Guide universe(s) will already know that the books, the TV series, the radio series, and all the other media versions have all been contradictory. Douglas Adams himself lost track of how many variant plotlines there were. Having read the interviews and seen the trailers, I'd say they're as close to following "the spirit" of the books as they can be.
Surviving the first 10 seconds is not the problem. Surviving the next 30 years is the problem.
There have been many articles and papers and whatnot published over the last several years, all proposing different models of what happens when Earth gets hit by a gamma-ray burst. They all point to Very Bad Things happening to the atmospheric layers, which then has a cascading effect.
Fine, you survive the first 10 seconds, but none of the crops did. Growing new crops in time to feed anyone is problematic when the UV shielding is gone. Reactions in the lower atmosphere would likely form a fair deal of the chemicals that result in "acid rain", so once you're wearing 100% UV sunscreen and can go outside, you still can't grow anything. Etc, etc.
This stopped working once login(1) implementations the world over started paying attention to the "special" characters even when in raw mode. Ah well. Fun while it lasted.
(I was inspired by a SF short story, where two robbers break into a paranoid guy's computer. They set off alarms because they had gotten the password right on the first attempt. The paranoid guy had, for years, deliberately screwed up the first attempt before giving the right one on the second try. Eventually the semi-smart programs adapted and started expecting this behavior.)
The available realms are predesignated, both source and destination. And it's a one-way trip. So all the l33t jerks at the level cap on (say) Warsong arrive on Bonechewer, trash the game economy, and cause the once-fast server to become unplayably slow.
The low-pop server becomes the high-pop server, and the high-pop server becomes the low-pop one. There's no "rate limiter" that notices when both realms have balanced out at medium-pop and disallows further transfers (or even warns about them). There's no going back for the "immigrant" Warsongers, and the dissatisfied "native" Bonechewers can't leave.
I used to hope that my own realm would get to transfer out. Now I'm hoping that we get to transfer out, and everybody else leaves. And I'm praying that we don't appear on the destination side of the list.
This is usually spelled "#pragma dwim" (do what I mean[t]), and is the holy grail of compiler technology. And managers.
Re:Tradeoff between C and C++?
on
GCC 4.0 Preview
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· Score: 1
Sorry to disappoint you; in 4.0, C++ code is highly optimized to produce the best assembly possible. C code is now converted into Bourne shell and written out as text.
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I'm waiting for the simulations to program their own copy of "SimResearcher" and start running little AIs in virtual environments.
Go read the papers at the C++ ISO Standard homepage. Module systems have been proposed well before
...is that they're already in use.
Remember that, when the language syntax was designed, the idea was that every conforming C program would also be a conforming "C With Classes" program. Identifiers like "abstract" and "interface" were already in use as user variables, types, functions, etc.
I think you would be pretty pissed off if the next revision of your dawn-to-disk programming language suddenly made "foo" or "i" a reserved keyword. :-)
Time has passed and the two languages no longer fit together like that. Hell, they barely resemble each other anymore. But even ignoring C, now there are valid C++ programs which use "abstract" and "interface" as identifiers, so the problem remains.
While I've always liked the Jackson quote, this one strikes a little closer to home for me:
Sun Microsystems doesn't like to talk about, or even acknowledge the existence of, Eclipse. Unless you really pester them about it.
After all, IBM picked the name: they're eclipsing the sun...
By far the best book I've ever seen for beginners, or relative beginners, is Accelerated C++. The authors have been involved in C++ since its inception and have been teaching it ever since as well.
Then it's brought up on the list and discussed. They're handled on a case-by-case basis. If we need access to the hardware in question, we ask for it. (Usually the person reporting the on-target problem has already volunteered.)
At least, most of the time.
Your argument holds only as long as you ignore cross-compilers... which by a useful coincidence happens to be the major strong point of the project being discussed. :-)
We require that patches which might affect a particular platform be tested by building a cross-compiler for that platform, and then running regressions tests. Some tests are looking at the generated assembly, some of them try to "run" the code if you have a simulator installed.
It's rather rare that the code needs to be executed on actual hardware to expose a bug in a proposed patch.
All of what dvdeug says here is true. I've done more than watch the list, I'm a maintainer, and David Edelsohn (an IBM employee) has always been willing to work with the GCC community. He even pushes the IBM developers and management to make each release of AIX slightly less bizzare than the previous release. Ulrich simply insults you if you disagree with him. He does not participate on the GCC lists; when he does send a message, it's a flame. I've never seen an explanatory email from him, on any topic.
See Manifold: Space and Diaspora for two of the better-written novels exploring the concept of gamma-ray bursts punching a galaxy-wide Big Red Button.
Actually, yes, I am, and I love it.
Welcome to our world of pain.
If you (the general "you", not specifically Alioth) ever wonder why we occasionally seem to not care about y'all's complaints, this is largely it. We can either get bitched at by you, or we can get bitched at by that other guy, but since neither you nor he contribute to the code, to the bug testing, or even to the discussion, it's all the same to us: inevitable undifferentiated noise. It's not official GCC policy, it's just how it works out.
Now, complaints from people who are actually making an effort to help -- those get our attention, awfully damn' fast.
Gaaahhh, I had almost successfully purged those memories with liquor and pr0n. Curse you!
Windows-M minimises.
Shift-Windows-M restores all the things that were previosuly minimised by Windows-M.
Douglas Adams wrote multiple versions of the screenplay, including the one used in the movie. The "new" characters, such as the one played by John Malkovich (sp?), were added by Adams specifically for the movie.
If Adams wrote it, grilling the producer about it seems pointless.
Also, fans of the Guide universe(s) will already know that the books, the TV series, the radio series, and all the other media versions have all been contradictory. Douglas Adams himself lost track of how many variant plotlines there were. Having read the interviews and seen the trailers, I'd say they're as close to following "the spirit" of the books as they can be.
Diaspora is another novel dealing with gamma-ray burster stars. Far less morbid than the Manifold "trilogy" (each novel in a seperate universe).
Surviving the first 10 seconds is not the problem. Surviving the next 30 years is the problem.
There have been many articles and papers and whatnot published over the last several years, all proposing different models of what happens when Earth gets hit by a gamma-ray burst. They all point to Very Bad Things happening to the atmospheric layers, which then has a cascading effect.
Fine, you survive the first 10 seconds, but none of the crops did. Growing new crops in time to feed anyone is problematic when the UV shielding is gone. Reactions in the lower atmosphere would likely form a fair deal of the chemicals that result in "acid rain", so once you're wearing 100% UV sunscreen and can go outside, you still can't grow anything. Etc, etc.
Yep, _Dogwalker_ was it, although I can't remember the author. I'll take your word that it was Card.
Backspace.
This stopped working once login(1) implementations the world over started paying attention to the "special" characters even when in raw mode. Ah well. Fun while it lasted.
(I was inspired by a SF short story, where two robbers break into a paranoid guy's computer. They set off alarms because they had gotten the password right on the first attempt. The paranoid guy had, for years, deliberately screwed up the first attempt before giving the right one on the second try. Eventually the semi-smart programs adapted and started expecting this behavior.)
The available realms are predesignated, both source and destination. And it's a one-way trip. So all the l33t jerks at the level cap on (say) Warsong arrive on Bonechewer, trash the game economy, and cause the once-fast server to become unplayably slow.
The low-pop server becomes the high-pop server, and the high-pop server becomes the low-pop one. There's no "rate limiter" that notices when both realms have balanced out at medium-pop and disallows further transfers (or even warns about them). There's no going back for the "immigrant" Warsongers, and the dissatisfied "native" Bonechewers can't leave.
I used to hope that my own realm would get to transfer out. Now I'm hoping that we get to transfer out, and everybody else leaves. And I'm praying that we don't appear on the destination side of the list.
The Onion reports the tragic news: Science Guy Bill Nye Killed In Massive Vinegar/Baking-Soda Explosion.
(Yah, it probably requires a fee. Pay it. The Onion's archives are worth it. *grin*)
Just to amplify on what you said: The two terms usually used in industry are "state of the art" and "state of the practice".
The second is what's known to be good in practice, and thus is widely used. The first is more cutting-edge.
This is usually spelled "#pragma dwim" (do what I mean[t]), and is the holy grail of compiler technology. And managers.
Sorry to disappoint you; in 4.0, C++ code is highly optimized to produce the best assembly possible. C code is now converted into Bourne shell and written out as text.
Yep, you got it.
If any of you have heard of the SIMPLE language, GIMPLE is an adaptation of that.