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Help a C++ coder see the light

Donn Cave donn at drizzle.com
Sun Feb 2 14:05:07 EST 2003 
Quoth "Brandon Van Every" <vanevery at 3DProgrammer.com>:
| Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
...
| >         Well, an even better reason to drop C++... and code it in Ada.
|
| Sure... if I knew Ada, and if it was relevant to the commercial games
| industry.  But it isn't.  C++ has the industrial weight behind it and that's
| terribly important to my business and long-term goals.  I'd drop any
| consideration of Python in a second if I thought it was likely to disappear
| over the next 25 years.
|
| The typecasting in C++ is strong enough for my purposes.  And everyone will
| agree it's stronger than what Python offers.

I bet you meant "type checking", not "typecasting".

I personally think neither are satisfactory.  I think the problems with
Python's lack of static typing are worse than people here are willing to
let on, but C++ is not a good role model.  The languages I've seen that
really put static typing to work for the programmer combine very strong
typing with type inference.  Maybe it isn't for everyone, but I need a
compiler that works with me to create a structurally sound program -
just like I need automatic storage management and exception based error
handling to keep me out of other types of trouble.  Unfortunately the
best I can do for languages with these attributes is Objective CAML,
which is a nice implementation but I'm afraid is too unattractive
syntactically to ever really catch on, and should mention Haskell here
too which is the opposite, will never go far for practical reasons.

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com
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