[sac-forum] Re: Paul's Programming

It's time to take this discussion some where else, most of us don't give a
hoot about programming.  The few of you that are interested in programming
should start your on club and leave us astronomer out of this b*** S***!!
       Joe Goss
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Paul Dickson" <dickson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <SAC-Forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, June 26, 2004 11:10
Subject: [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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