Why is python not written in C++ ?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2010-08-02, Paul Rubin <no.email at nospam.invalid> wrote:
> Michael Torrie <torriem at gmail.com> writes:
>> Sometimes, C++ is just the right tool for the job, despite all its
>> warts....  C++'s object semantics (guaranteed destruction, scoping,
>> etc) can sometimes work very well when you need the speed of a
>> compiled language, but don't want to be quite as low-level as C.
>> 
>> In this case, C++ is certainly not a better tool for the job than C.
>
> The stuff C++ adds to C is a mix of good and bad, and it's reasonably
> possible to use just the good stuff and ignore the bad.

Except nobody does. ;)

> I've never programmed in Ada but I'm intrigued by these articles:
>
>   http://adahome.com/Ammo/cpp2ada.html 
>   http://www.adaic.org/whyada/ada-vs-c/cada_art.html
>
> I have the impression that Ada has an undeservedly bad rap because of
> its early implementations and its origins in military bureaucracy. 
> I'd certainly consider it as an alternative to C or C++ if I had to
> write a big program in a traditional procedural language.

I've always thought Ada was a pretty nice embedded/systems languages,
but some of the initial implementations were indede horrible. The one
I used for a little while ran on VAX/VMS but didn't use the VMS
filesystem, editors, or other utilities.  The Ada enviroment was a
completely closed, walled system.  It kept it's "files" in some sort
of opaque database and they could only be accessed, edited, compiled,
etc. from within the Ada development enviornment (a system with
really, really awful editing and build tools).  There was a way to
import/export files, but it wasn't easy. Still, the Ada-environment
tools were _so_ bad that people exported a file, edited it using some
VMS-based editor and the re-imported it whenever a change needed to be
made.

Apparently the intent was to provide the identically awful
user-torturing-experience regardless of OS.

-- 
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