[sac-forum] Re: Paul's Programming

On Sat, 26 Jun 2004 09:48:13 -0800, Stanley A. Gorodenski wrote:

> What is your opinion of C? It has a reputation of being very fast and 
> easy to learn, and I know of one case where it is being used in academic 
> research to write programs for phyogenetic studies because it is so fast.

Short answer:  High-level assembly language.

Longer:
You end up spending far more time coding the details of how to load and
store data than you do solving the problem.  This detail is important for
operating systems and other embedded applications, but most applications
don't need this level of detail.

C is not an easy language to learn how to use correctly.  It's pretty
trivial if you don't use pointers.  But since C passes data to functions
using pass-by-value, you can't do much without pointers.  Especially if
you don't know in advance how much data you'll be working with.  At that
point you start allocating memory for buffers and lists.  You have a
headache just waiting to happen.

        -Paul

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