On Friday 30 September 2005 06:07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > For just about everything you can do with a pointer in C there is > > a better, easier, less error prone way to do the same thing in > > O'caml and write less lines of code to do it. > > How about writing a network protocol stack. You get a packet and all > you know about it is that here is a block of memory. You then have > to figure out what sort of packet it is, how long it is and what > structure to give it. C handles this very nicely with pointers to > structures that can be cast into whatever you need. > > > The one exception > > I can thing of is writing devices drivers and operating systems > > where you need to direct access to harware. > > If you are talking about I/O ports, you can always write a pair > of functions to write and read from I/O and these can be added to > any language (possibly even as inlines if the language supports that). > > There is no native I/O port access in C. > > Consider how useful functions like memcpy() and memcmp() are for > writing an O/S. Consider also that an O/S is actually a form of self > modifying code which strict type checking is designed to prevent. > I isn't about direct hardware access, it is about having the flexibility > to do what needs to be done. Try the simple exercise of writing an > O'caml program that reads in a chunk of binary code from a file, > and then executes that code to get a result. Less lines of code than C?
Horses for courses! most of my programming would be much harder to do if I had to put up with wosname from the compiler. So I love pointers and arrays and not having to touch the hardware through thick felt gloves, but I conceed that in the middle of encrypted fpos transactions you proddly (probably :-) don't want to worry about them. if O'caml works for you <yay>, but don't presume that C is a bad option for me! I know how to write bullet-proof C. eg SPTA (NSW) train transponder system 5000 lines very complex C (digital filtering etc) several 1000 transponders every train every day 10 years BUGS Found: 0 QED James James -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
