Subj : Re: year 11 maths survey
To   : comp.programming
From : Richard Heathfield
Date : Sun Sep 11 2005 07:04 am

Jon Harrop said:

> Richard Heathfield wrote:
>> Nixon said:
>> Question 5 has some more problems. For one thing, C and C++ are two very
>> different languages, and should not be lumped together.
> 
> C is almost a subset of C++, so I wouldn't say they are "very different".

I would. A well-written C++ program which takes advantage of common C++ 
idioms is effectively unreadable to anyone who knows C but not C++.

> 
>> Knowledge of one
>> does not necessarily mean knowledge of the other.
> 
> C programmers can use C++ compilers.

Sure, if they want to write C++. COBOL programmers can do the same. But, 
whilst it is true that some of my C programs will compile under a C++ 
compiler, many do not. And a few that do compile will have different 
semantics under C++ than they do under C.

>> Secondly, you've
>> included some very old languages which are likely to have few followers
>> nowadays (e.g. Algol, Modula, BCPL) and missed out some fairly popular
>> ones (APL, Perl, C#).
> 
> OCaml, SML, Haskell, Mathematica, F#. I thought APL was an old language?

Yes, APL is old, but I didn't think I could reasonably claim that it has few 
followers! (Had I done so, I'd probably be dead by now.)


> I'd appreciate it if the OP published the results. I'd like to know what
> languages other people are using. :-)

At best, you'd find out what languages comp.programming people claim to use 
when filling in an online survey posted by a schoolboy. I do not wish to 
cast aspersions on the honesty of my fellow comp.programmers, but I suspect 
the temptation to add languages we haven't used for many years may prove 
too great for some of us to resist! :-)

(Before I decided not to post my survey answers after all, I realised I'd 
added EXEC to my "programming languages" reply - and I haven't written a 
line of EXEC since about 1984.)

-- 
Richard Heathfield
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29/7/2005
http://www.cpax.org.uk
email: rjh at above domain

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