#C to Pascal
4 messages in this thread
Jack– You shoulda asked me about C to Pascal conversions. I could have
told you it was a pain. 🙂 (the sharp reader will guess how _I_ found
out).
Beats me why C programmers go all out to use such complicated
incomprehensible structures and features. It's darned hard to get going in
the first place and pure torture to maintain in the future. Reminds me of
how assembly code used to be written, including at one time by me. But it
didn't take me long to learn that such habits caused real grief.
An example of that illustrates how hard such things are to comprehend comes
from a song from around 35 years ago. I don't remember the name or the
singer but the refrain was:
I was looking back to see, if you were looking back to see, if I was
looking back to see, if you were looking back at me.
In 20 years of assembly coding, I've found that like those lyrics indirect
addressing remains just as difficult to comprehend.
Tom
Good question: why _ARE_ they so enamored of structures, pointers, and
malloc. Granted, they are wonderful features and have their uses. But
there's no law that says that you _HAVE_ to use chained pointers as the
solution to every problem. Sometimes a good ol' static array works just as
well, maybe better.
Reminds me of a fellow who used to work for me. He generated the most
complex, and I'm sure to him, elegant, assembler code I've ever seen. Most
of it never worked. Once I told him, "You know, just because the CPU has a
lot of different instructions, there's no law that says that you HAVE to
use them at least once in each program."
Jack
>why _ARE_ they so enamored of structures, pointers, and malloc.
Because sometimes they're the best way to do things. Because sometimes you
don't know how big something's going to be at compile time. Because some
people don't think like you do.
Joe
At the same time, Tom, if you stick with a limited subset of language
features, you might as well do all your code in FORTRAN.
Joe