[Freeciv-Dev] Re: curiosity

[Stepan Roh <stepan@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 2 Dec 2001, Raimar Falke wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 02, 2001 at 10:32:06AM +0100, Alan Schmitt wrote:
> > * Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa (vasc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> > > basic:            no functions or procedures, game over. GOSUB? no thanks.
> > > logo:             need i say anything? good for teaching programming and 
> > > nothing
> > >           else.
> > > pascal:           too strict, you end up typing way too much. for loops 
> > > are much
> > >           less flexible. i find it too contraining and limited.
> >
> > But local function declaration, which can be useful.
> >
> > > modula-2: nicer than pascal, but still has most of its problems.
> > > c:                fast, flexible, easy to shoot your foot with, really 
> > > hard
> > >           to debug, has virtually universal support.
> > > x86 asm:  not portable.
> > > smalltalk:        its dead what can i say?
> > > c++:              nearly as fast as c, flexible, horribly complex syntax,
> > >           unreadable code, mixes implementation with interfaces, you
> > >           can easily interface to c, STL sucks, needs a bigger API,
> > >           inheritance and templates are nice, as hard to debug as c.
> > > lisp:             several built-in data types, flexible, code is more
> > >           unreadable because of prefixed notation, code is more
> > >           elegant because of prefixed notation, slow, crap compilers,
> > >           crap garbage collection, lousy interface to c, has OO
> > >           support.
> > > prolog:           i doubt this can be a general purpose language.
> > > caml:             obfuscated function declaration syntax.
> >
> > Although I agree Ocaml syntax is not perfect, how about comparing the
> > identity function:
> >
> > let id x = x
> >
> > and
> >
> > void* id(void* x){
> >   return x;
> > }
> >
> > OK, I cheated, I used polymorphism and type reconstruction to make C
> > look bad. How about the incr function:
> >
> > let incr x = x + 1
> >
> > and
> >
> > int incr(int x){
> >   return (x+1);
> > }
>
> Just for the record: python
>
>   def incr(x): return x+1
> or
>   incr=lambda x: x+1
>
> Even nicer is this:
>
> add=lambda x,y: x+y
>
> add(3,4) = 7
> add("hello", "world") = "helloworld"
> add([3,4], [5,6]) = [3, 4, 5, 6]
> add(4+5j, 6+8j) = 10+13j

This is going very OT, but I can't stay away from this "Hey, my favorite
language has better or shorter syntax" :-)

perl:
sub incr ($) { $_[0]+1 }; or even shorter sub incr { $_[0]+1 };

haskell:
incr x = x + 1

But why using anything other than C? Pascal-like languages (Pascal,
Modula-2, Ada) are hard to use, because of their strict-type checking and
limited expressioning. C++ is bad designed, not to mention STL. And
building C++ programs requires much more memory and time than building C
programs. Java has almost ideal OO syntax and its peformance is not as bad
as it used to be, but Java programs are memory-eaters. Smalltalk and
Eiffel are too slow and almost dead. Perl and Python are general-purpose
languages, but users of these languages are fundamentalist and using one
of them will lose users of other language. Prolog can't be used, that's
obvious.

I say C and call other languages if necessary. And hey... Isn't it the way
Freeciv is now?

Have a nice day.

Stepan Roh