[plug] [why not staroffice]

[Christian]

On Sat, Oct 07, 2000 at 10:18:23PM +0800, tlee wrote:
> 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?

Ummm... no.  In fact, you couldn't be much more wrong.  I would suggest
that over 50% of software currently in use today is written in C (the
figure could easily be 60%+).  Linux, X11, GNOME and the GNU utilities
are all written predominantly in C.  Windows is written in C.  The vast
majority of programs are.  Also, the majority of programs being written
today are also written in C.  A lot of software that uses other
langauges (e.g., Java, Perl, Python) also use substantial amounts of C
code given that C performs significantly better than these other
languages.

 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?

C is reasonably portable, especially if written to be that way.  If you
use features that are specific to one compiler or library then of course
the program won't compile without these features/libraries.  If you want
a demonstration of how portable C is, download the source code to
something reasonably large (e.g., Perl or XFree86) and compile it yourself.
Note that you will have to configure the compilation so that it knows
what system to target -- also compare how many possible systems you
could have configured the compile for.  All things considered (namely
that performance that it gives), C is pretty portable.