Thread: Joke of the week

A fellow programmer (coworker) told me the other day, dead serious, "pretty much everyone is getting away from using pointers these days."



Tubbs

i dont get it...

What do you mean, you don't get it? How can you write anything of significance in C without pointers?

Tubbs

reminds me of this one:

One day I was in a public park, reading "C++ For Dummies" when someone came up and asked me what I was reading. I told him I was reading a book about C++. He responded, "Oh, HTML kicks C++'s @$$."

Source: Computer Stupidities.

Now i gett that one...

Well, they all have their place, I guess, but I've never read much programming literature of note that didn't mention things like "write all the high level stuff in [pick a language], leaving speed-critical items for C", or something similar.

I'm pretty new to C myself, I've mainly programmed in non-compiled languages like Perl and JavaScript and Java and PL/SQL (Oracle).

Let me tell you, C is a rude awakening, but the challenges are refreshing.

At any rate, it was obvious very quickly that anything of significance in C would involve plenty of pointers

Tubbs

"You dont need c any more, why work with pointers when you could just get a garbage collector to do all the work"
He then went on to tell me why java is greatest language of them all and is replacing c.

LOL, you should tell that honours student that Java has pointers. They're just not explicit like in C, where you declare them with a *.

PHP and Perl are strictly interpreted languages, never saved to binary or bytecode. Java is NOT what most would refer to as compiled, in the true sense, straight to machine code. It is "translated" to bytecode that is interpreted by a virtual machine.

I'm not THAT new.

Tubbs

If we were to go by the definition of compile listed here (just the first one that popped up when I searched), I suppose we could say that anything that isn't written in direct machine language is compiled.

Your definition of compiled simply differs from mine. I don't consider a language truly compiled unless it is translated to architecture-specific machine language and saved to a file saved on a non-volatile medium.

Java is not translated to machine language, it's an intermediate language that is further interpreted at runtime. PHP and Perl are interpreted at runtime (cached in some cases) and saved in interpreted format in memory, not to disk (exceptions exist, but were not part of the original design).

I don't think there's a right or wrong here, it's perspective. No harm, no foul.

Tubbs