On Jul 20, 1:51 pm, Richard Heathfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> James Kanze said:
> <snip>
> > C was never really a good general purpose language. It was
> > never used (nor even usable) in commercial software, for
> > example.
> So MS Windows is not commercial software? Interesting.
Yes. Commercial can be used in several senses (and I'm not sure
of the usual English usage here). There's a lot of software
written in C that is commercial in the sense that it is sold
(i.e. commercial as opposed to free software). What I was
talking about, however, was the application domain. You can't
really do accounting in C, for example, because it has neither a
built in decimal type (like Cobol), nor operator overloading on
user defined types (like C++). More generally, C is pretty bad
for text handling as well.
Of course, a lot of early Unix systems only had C, and between C
and assembler, you used C, even if it wasn't the ideal language
for the job. (Although the old X/Open group did try to
standardize a Cobol dialect for Unix.)
--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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