[NTLUG:Discuss] Evil C++ (was Re: Evil GCC-2.96)
cbbrowne@ntlug.org
cbbrowne at ntlug.org
Mon Jun 18 15:24:12 CDT 2001
Will Senn wrote:
> Richard said, quite politely, btw:
>
> Lo, on Monday, June 18, Will Senn did write:
>
> <sic>
>
> In a word, <snip>.
>
> In point of fact, I am a full-time (sic)
>
> -------------------------------------
> Richard,
> Well, I used to be a full-time (sic) and now I lead a bunch of
> full-time script developers and db freaks. Stop by if you have
> flash installed to http://postfuture.com/. Or send yourself examples
> of the real thing by going to http://postfuture.com/registration/.
> I only wish my life were so simple that I had the leisure to choose
> to use a single language :) No joy! Our system is SQL/VBScript/-
> ASP/Perl/Flash/ and whatever else could be used to develop a solution by
> Friday this week!
>
> All,
>
> Richard's point has plenty of merit, C++ is a bit unwieldy for the
> casual developer and has a huge overhead wrt management(devwise)
> so where are all the pro-schemers? Anybody on the list know of some
> good applications of scheme in linux? I mean, I use perl or python
> (and c) for most tasks in linux, what can I accomplish with scheme
> that I cannot or perhaps could(with way more effort) in perl/python/c?
My "contract-du-jour" is a program to do analysis of some proprietary
binary formats. [Schematics for electronic circuitry, to be precise.]
I'm building pattern matchers to search for interesting patterns to
help in the writing of parsers for this.
The target language is [:-)] a conglomeration of C++ code and macros,
but I'm building the pattern search in Common Lisp.
There was a parser that would do simple matching, in C++, which basically
just implements a state machine.
The CL version has none of the memory allocation complexity of the C++
version, and while it does rather a lot more already, it's about half
the size.
The clever part is that I've got a little "pattern language," embedded
in CL, which would likely require using something like Yacc were I trying
to do it in C++.
You'll never see this app; its use is in generating code that gets
largely rewritten before it gets used. But doing it in C++ would be
terribly harder.
--
Christopher Browne
<http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/resume.html>
cbbrowne at acm.org
(613) 225-3689
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