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> I know that C is, for many things, by far the best langauge. It has > many > plus points and it even has a couple of charming quirks. > > But goddamn is it fucking retarded. There are so many little language > features that would have made life these days so much easier. What really torques me off is people who refuse to use the appropriate features in languages that have them. Namespaces in Tcl, for example. Don Libes CGI library doesn't use namespaces. That's OK, it was designed before namespaces. But it doesn't do what we did before namespaces and define names with a common prefix (like, say, cgi_) to keep things tidy. For example, to generate an HTML link (<a href...>...</a>) you use "link". But to be "helpful", it defines all its functions with names like "cgi_link". Then, at the last minute, it checks for a name collision and renames them to their final name (like, link) if the name isn't already used. So they don't override previously defined globals. But all that means is that instead of screwing over people who use other libraries, you screw over people who use YOUR library. Or people working on their code. I spent hours chasing that one down when I was working on wikit last weekend. Because of course I brought in another library that defined a link (TclX) and then I couldn't find the definition of the clobbered version of link anywhere. Because it wasn't ever defined as link. It was defined as cgi_link and renamed. HATE.There's stuff above here
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