From: Martin Weber <Ephaeton@...>
Date: 2002-08-01T02:00:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and Ocaml - my two favorite languages

On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 01:17:35AM +0900, Ned Konz wrote:
> On Tuesday 30 July 2002 05:57 pm, MikkelFJ wrote:
> > While I do envy the garbage collection of Java and C#, and possibly
> > the libraries, I still consider C++ a much more powerfull language
> > but also much more difficult and unnecessarily complex.
> 
> Of course, there's no reason why you couldn't use GC with C++; there 
> are some good libraries for this.
> 
> My feeling is that using C++ with GC and the STL (and C++ strings) 
> would result in considerably fewer C style bugs (stray pointers, 
> buffer overflows, multiple frees, etc.) and faster development.

Agreed. Many people go searching for a new language instead of using
the provided libraries for a language. That's a good reason to use
C, scheme, and C++, too. Just because you can do regexp's in Perl,
and not easily in C++ (without a library) doesn't mean you should
switch to perl just because it offers regexps. I think that's really
ridiculous.

On the other hand ruby overall offers a somewhat more pleasant
experience to the programmer, given that it doesn't try to be
downwards compatible to C, and thus is more high level :-)

(still, I want lisp style macros in ruby ... gotta forge my own, eh? :-)

-Martin