...

Greenwald and his collaborators (at various papers around the world) have been releasing it slowly. There is some controversy about this... clearly Greenwald is ordering the information in such a way as to maximize and extend the impact. Personally I approve.

fascinating news... I had no idea AOL was still in business. I worked at spinner.com (which streamed music and was not a blog) when AOL bought us and Winamp... I left almost immediately, somewhat as a result.

Uh, no. For example, CompUSA used to sell various Linux distributions. They, of course, had a store in Boston that was within walking distance of FSF headquarters. They were not required to provide the source code.

what? no. the saints go on the fire first.

it's not practical to expect change and give into that kind of thing. He's already done more than the world's press has managed with decades to work at it.

if I take a C program and make it C++ compliant (like no variable called "new") you are saying it will run slower compiled by g++ as C++? There is no excuse or valid reason for that. I have to agree that would be a bug in g++ if true.

actually, it's because if you know what you are doing you can make it run as fast as C, and access the hardware as easily as free, and also, if you know what you're doing you can make higher level and more flexible abstractions.

people seem to have an objection to the "know what you are doing" requirement, and seem to think that in C, you don't have to know and the code manifests well. If there is any truth to that... that C code is all nicely organized now, and naturally safe, then it's only because the C programmers have internalized certain idioms and avoided other possible ones... which is what you have to do in C++ as well to use it well.

the idea of a language which works well without knowing what you are doing is laughable to me. The illusion comes, for example, from languages where you can build a robust web server in five lines (or whatever)... yes, because it has a webserver built in! if you are going to do something besides say "run this program which was already written", then you need to understand logic and machines. There is no way around that.

C++ can be made as fast as C, don't deny it because I can write a C++ program that IS C. So it's a truism. That means you only need any feature that imposes any performance hit if it saves you some other way, like protecting memory or allowing one to save time in what is actually the most precious resource, developer time.

never

no offense, but that's like striving to integrate your hammer and screw driver.

anyone that believes in perfection is an idiot.

It was never at all meant to be perfect, it was meant to be useful.

I'm surprised at all the whining about C++, especially the idea that C is somehow a more readable or organized language. Perhaps after all the general purpose programmers went elsewhere, the COMMUNITY of c programmers started writing cleaner code... ok, but the language... promoting that?

C++ aimed for complete-as-possible compatibility with C, especially static linking which helped ensure that C++ can follow C anywhere, a useful thing.

blaming C++ for the stupid things purists might like it odd, since purists have never been fond of C++ afaik, and if so, why are they in a multiparadigmed language that allows you to break most of it's rules at will (using C syntax).

It's like blaming Country Music Lyrics on English.

I learned C++ around 1993-94 I guess after having been a C programmer from about 84-85. This is the way to use it. The fact that you can have class hierarchies with structures is itself useful. I have converted C code to C++ simply by making a structure able to initialize itself, a safe fix for code which would have been a nightmare to fix some other way (go to every malloc of the structure and do it there, all throughout the code?)

But evidently such use of C++ provides too much temptation for some. That's too bad.

Also, as a C programmer at that time we all became aware of how the C compiled, what instructions you were really looking at, and in C++ at that time, my colleagues and I at least (in the game industry then) continued to view C++ this way. If I learned a new feature of C++, I studied how it would look in memory, how it would look if it was a C structure (or set of such), making it quite easy to avoid certain problems.

As a C programmer I expected myself to do this. Also, this revealed where the performance hits were, and what to avoid. C++ is multiparadigmed (or unparadigmed, or, a crazy toolbox)... so? man up and learn the tools including which ones you don't want.

As far as the problem of what OTHER programmers do with C++... if people have not seen crazy things done with C... confusing bad things... I cannot explain that. How can that be? Some historical accident because the language does not prohibit it, it's up to the programmer.

Then again, as long as it's not proprietary, I couldn't care less what languages other programmers like.

what the hell difference would that make?

larry ellison is still alive?

what idiot goes to a locksmith to copy a key? Cause I know the hardware store will copy those keys.