On Jul 20, 10:50 am, "Alf P. Steinbach" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > * James Kanze: > > C was never really a good general purpose language. It was > > never used (nor even usable) in commercial software, for > > example.
> I'm not sure that statement is valid. > It would be very surprising, to say the least, if no or just a > very few commercial applications were written in C. There are certainly a few. Way back when, however, the X/Open group proposed standardizing a form of Cobol (under Unix!) because C was felt to be unusable for business applications. At least certain types of business applications require some sort of decimal type. If the language doesn't have it built in (as Cobol and PL-1 did), and it doesn't have operator overloading, expressions quickly become unreadable. For those applications, at least, if the language doesn't have a built-in decimal type, and it doesn't have operator overloading, then it's really unusable for those applications (although you'll doubtlessly find some masocists doing it). -- James Kanze (GABI Software) email:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Conseils en informatique orientée objet/ Beratung in objektorientierter Datenverarbeitung 9 place Sémard, 78210 St.-Cyr-l'École, France, +33 (0)1 30 23 00 34 _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss