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From: Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Top 10 most common hard skills listed on resumes...
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2024 10:54:56 +0300
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On Sun, 25 Aug 2024 17:48:14 -0700
Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com> wrote:

> Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> writes:
> 
> > On Sun, 25 Aug 2024 18:36:46 +0200
> > Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >  
> >> On 24.08.2024 20:27, Bart wrote:
> >>  
> >>> On 24/08/2024 19:11, Bonita Montero wrote:
> >>>  
> >>>> I guess C++ is used much more often because you're multiple times
> >>>> more produdtive than with C. And programming in C++ is a
> >>>> magnitude less error-prone.  
> >>>
> >>> C++ incorporates most of C. So someone can write 'C++' code but
> >>> can still have most of the same problems as C.  
> >>
> >> It's true that C++ decided to inherit unsafe C designs as C being
> >> sort of its base.  But a sophisticated programmer would knowingly
> >> avoid the unsafe parts and use the existing safer C++ constructs.
> >> Only that a language allows that you *can* write bad code doesn't
> >> mean you cannot avoid the problems.  Of course it would have been
> >> (IMO) better if the unsafe parts were replaced or left out, but
> >> there were portability consideration in C++'s design.
> >>
> >>  
> >>> [...]  
> >
> > Safe HLLs without mandatory automatic memory management  
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean by this description.  Do you mean
> languages that are otherwise unsafe but have a safe subset?
> If not that then please elaborate. 

That is nearly always a case in practice, but it does not have to be.
I can't give a counterexample, but I can imagine language similar to
Pascal that has no records with variants and no procedure Dispose and
also hardens few other corners that I currently forgot about.

> What are some examples of
> "safe HLLs without mandatory automatic memory management"?
>

The most prominent examples are Ada and Rust.
It seems that Zig tries the same, but I was not sufficiently interested
to dig deeper. Partly because last time when I tried to play with Zig it
refused to install on Wit7 machine.

> > tend to fall
> > into two categories:
> > 1. Those that already failed to become popular
> > 2. Those for which it will happen soon  
> 
> It's been amusing reading a discussion of which languages are or are
> not high level, without anyone offering a definition of what the
> term means.  Wikipedia says, roughly, that a high-level language is
> one that doesn't provide machine-level access (and IMO that is a
> reasonable characterization). 

I don't like this definition. IMHO, what language does have is at least
as important as what it does not have for the purpose of estimating its
level.

> Of course no distinction along these
> lines is black and white - almost all languages have a loophole or
> two - but I expect there is general agreement about which languages
> clearly fail that test.  In particular, any language that offers
> easy access to raw memory addresses (and both C and C++ certainly
> do), is not a high-level language in the Wikipedia sense.
> 
> Second amusement:  using the term popular without giving any
> kind of a metric that measures popularity.
> 

Precise definitions of everything are hard.
May be, popular == 1st or close second choice for particular sort of
programming job? Plus, somehow add popularity points for being used in
many fields?

> Third amusement:  any language that has not yet become popular
> has already failed to become popular.
>

There is also "heir apparent' type - languages that are recognized as
not particularly popular now, but believed by many, including press, to
become popular in the future.

> > That despite at least one language in the 1st category being
> > pretty well designed, if more than a little over-engineered.  
> 
> Please, don't keep us in suspense.  To what language do you refer?

I thought, that every reader understood that I meant Ada.