On 1/27/07, John Francis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 27, 2007 at 09:40:22AM -0800, Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote:
> > Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I don't care about beauty, I
> > care about readability and understandability.
> >
> > I find well written, well formatted Lisp to be quite readable. Same
> > for C, Pascal, BASIC, and even FORTRAN up to a point. Even good
> > assembly language can be readable.
> >
> > C++ gives me a headache to read, as did Ada, COBOL, FORTH and a few
> > others.
> >
> > G
>
> That's strange - I find precisely the reverse to be true.
>
> Well-written C++ makes it very easy to see what is going on;
> the structure and logic flow of any part of the program are
> very clear, and not obscured by messy implementation details.
> All that sort of stuff can be hidden inside object methods
> (and with inlining there's not even a performance penalty).
>
> Mind you, the important qualifier there is "well-written".
>

Not only that, you have to worry about getting too clever with
operators.  I.e. a = b; can have some unintended consequences.
Novices can get carried away with C++'s standard template library and
end up with a performance nightmare.

> And trying to make sense of something like the C++ standard
> template library is not an easy task; you need to understand
> just about all the nuances and ramifications of the language
> before diving into that.  But understanding a program that
> *uses* the template library is a whole lot easier.
>
> Sometimes, in fact, it can be *too* easy. If the abstraction
> is done well a C++ program can appear deceptively simple.
>
>
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