On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 5:00 AM, Stéfan van der Walt <stefan@sun.ac.za> wrote:

2008/7/20 Michael Abbott <michael@araneidae.co.uk>:

>> I'm very impressed with your ability to follow these reference count
>> issues. Especially given that you only started learning about the
>> Python C-API a few months ago (if I remember correctly).
> Alas no. I'm a bit of an old lag really, I did dabble with the Python C
> API quite a few years ago (2001ish maybe?). Myy roots are in computer
> science and then assembler (graduated 1980) before Pascal (seriously) then
> C, then C++ (which I now regard as a serious mistake) and finally shell

It's scary how many of us were scarred for life by C++.

I rather like C++, especially the templates and (BOOST) smart pointers. One just has to avoid using the more exotic features, think ten or twenty times before using inheritance, and be very suspicious of operator overloading. And <cstdio> is your friend.

But If you need to ration memory and worry about dynamic allocation, forget it. I wouldn't use it for drivers.

Chuck