[plug] [why not staroffice]

[tlee]

Great to hear you using C for whole program. No doubt that C is greased
lighting. But network traffic seems to me to be very much domain of sysadmins
whom I think use C all the time for patching and the like, but would you sit
down and write a general ledger program for instance in C knowing that most of
the work is going to revolve around master file, transaction file databases?

Hook wrote:

> Not true (about the long programs).  C is (OK, *can be*) fast and pretty
> efficient. I'm currently writing a network traffic accounting system in C
> largely because it's considerably faster than any of the limited number of
> other choices.
>
> Portability is an issue with any language. You can write portable C with
> considerable effort, and you can write C that is pretty much tied into the
> platform that you're developing on. Usually, the core of any program can be
> made portable, it's the interfaces to the external world that give trouble
> (i.e. the differences between X and the MickeySoft equivalent).
>
> Paul
>
> > Thanks for the feedback on programming - this is certainly an active
> group.
> > I too have found that C does not handle strings as well as some other
> languages,
> > but I have heard from nerds that C is very good for writing languages, and
> for
> > operating systems. I reason that most sysadmins must use C a lot for
> patches and
> > the like, but that nobody would actually sit down and write a long program
> in C.
> > Am I right in thinking this?
> > But I also find that most languages look very like C to me with the
> variable
> > initialisations, include libraries and the like - also the layout of the
> source
> > code is very much like C.
> > I heard that unix itself was written in C, so I reason that everybody
> should know
> > a bit of C. Also it is not high level but yet not low level like
> assembler.
> > Perhaps mid level, which means that you have to do a lot of lines of code
> to come
> > up with the same outcome as yo could with much less coding in Pascal? Even
> though
> > they say C is very portable I found code which would compile and run under
> turbo C
> > would not do so on microsof C. Also would not compile on GC, so I am
> wondering
> > just how portable it is?