13 Aug
2006
13 Aug
'06
5:34 p.m.
Don wrote:
Jules Richardson wrote:
The very idea that you can pass anything other than LVALUES as
parameters is evil. Jackass language designers (Oh! I'm going to
design the silver bullet language that it is impossible to write a
bug in) and compiler writers are to blame. Really, everything
should still be written in assembler. C is just a portable
assembler. I'm not kidding here.
Tim Shoppa wrote:
And, to be honest, I think "we" (developers, etc.) also take
advantage of the improvements in technology. Laziness creeps
in. E.g., I had to write a nice little search algorithm
to minimize a function. I didn't hesitate to pass int[50]
arrays AS ARGUMENTS to the *recursive* function (e.g.,
it will recurse to a depth of ~50 and each invocation
carries 200 bytes of int[] arguments). Sure, I could
write something more elegant but it's a throw-away
algorithm (to verify some parameters) that I *may* use
twice more in my lifetime?? Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at
yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
I think the problem there was that the software guys saw that people
were buying lots of hardware because it was cheap, and bloated their
code out to match :( Why it's getting steadily worse, I don't
know. I'm tempted to lay the
blame at the feet of faster and more widespread communications; if
people can communicate more quickly and further afield then there'll
be more pressure to get a job done as quickly as possible and with an
eye to short-term savings only.
I was tempted to think that in the 2000 era we had gotten past the hump
of "buy more hardware because it's cheap" stage.