Thread: Why C Matters

Originally Posted by abachler

As for function overloading, its called function renaming, The C++ preprocessor just handles it automatically for you.

You're right, function overloading is usually implemented by "mangling" the names of the functions to include some information about the function's arguments. However, it's the compiler that does this, not the preprocessor. The preprocessor does very few things, among them:

• File inclusion with #include.
• Conditional compilation with #if etc.
• Macros with #define.
• Comments (the preprocessor strips them).
• String literal concatenation.

The first C++ "compiler" was actually a source-to-source translator: it simply converted C++ into C. So every feature of C++ can be represented in C. In fact, every feature of C++ can be represented in assembly -- that's how compilers can exist.

But that doesn't mean we should be programming directly in assembly just because C++ can be converted into assembly. It's convenience, and abstraction, that makes us use higher-level languages.

I dont disagree with you dwks, but I dont see C++ as a seperate language from C. It has more features for sure, just as modern english is more descriptive than english of say 100 years ago. Both can be translated into grunts whistles and other basic phoenetic primitives. That doesnt make 19th century english and modern english 2 seperate languages, nor does it mean we should all go around speaking in phoenetics either. I can obviously translate any modern phrases into terms in use in the 19th century, granted it woudl take longer to express teh same concepts, just as it woudl take more lines of code to express the same behavior in C as in C++. Again, this does not make them seperate languages, merely differnt dialects at most.

Originally Posted by vart

it is for dynamic memory allocation, what it has to do with classes? If you do not use classes?

new/delete is the primary way to instantiate a class. it is a bit difficult to instantiate a class using malloc. I really fail to see what you are asking?

Code:

int* arr = new int[15];

can be just as easily expressed in C as

Code:

int* arr = malloc(15 * sizeof(int));