[NCLUG] Books?

[Rich Blinne]

----Original Message Follows----
From: Sean Reifschneider <jafo at tummy.com>
Reply-To: nclug at nclug.org
To: nclug at nclug.org
Subject: Re: [NCLUG] Books?
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 16:50:49 -0700

On Tue, Feb 13, 2001 at 05:51:18PM -0800, J. Paul Reed wrote:
 >On 02 Dec 2000 at 13:03:29, Luke Light modified my mailspool to say:
 >> I am interested in learning C++ and was wondering if anybody would
 >> recommend any books?  I checked out GNU C++ For Linux, any opinions on
 >> that book?
 >
 >I would recommend both Stroustroup's "The C++ Programming Language" (3rd.
 >Edition) for reference and advanced topic purposes... and Lippman's C++

That one's not bad, but I'd whole-heartedly recommend Programming In Python.
;-)

The Design and Evolution of C++ by Stroustrup I really enjoyed.  It's a
"Here's why C++ is the way it is" book, which really helped me grok it.

--------------

Learning some of that can be real helpful.  Back in 1990, I presented at a 
poster session for the C++ Usenix conference.  It was about my type 
parameterization system as this was pre-templates in C++.  I had a chance to 
talk a bit with Bjarne Stroustrup, Stan Lippman, and Andy Koenig.  As I was 
saying, at that point in time they were trying to add templates and 
exceptions to the language.  Bjarne was very much trying to keep the number 
of keywords to a minimum.  So, he had a very lame proposal with respect to 
exceptions.  That is, having one new keyword catch.  So, if you catching an 
exception you used catch and if you were throwing an exception you used -- 
catch.  The analogy that Bjarne gave was when playing ball you would yell 
"Catch!" as you threw the ball!  Fortunately, the ISO committee killed this 
and added a throw keyword.  This example was illustrative of some of the 
historical baggage of C++.  Some of them were:

1. C++ can be a better C.  It does type checking and automatic type 
conversion without the OO features.  This is one reason why it is not as 
pure an OO language as either Java or Python.

2. Speed is essential.  Remember, C++ grew up when Smalltalk was the cat's 
meow. But Smalltalk ran so slowly that it was impractical.  This gave rise 
to the vtables inside of C++ where some of the method selection was 
pre-computed by the compiler.  In fact, the virtual keyword which provided 
run-time polymorphism came out only in version 2 of the cfront 
implementation of C++.

3. Multiple inheritance came late.  C++ started out with only single 
inheritance.  At the above-mentioned 1990 conference, T.A. Cargill presented 
a paper stated that multiple inheritance was unnecessary.  Multiple 
inheritance was implemented with the add new keywords at pain of death.  
Thus, you had the keyword virtual overloaded a lot.  (Pun intended)

4. Re-use libraries were developed prior to working templates.  So, all of 
the people including myself developed our own infrastructures to do our kind 
of template instantiation.  (My paper was about my library that I did for 
NCR.)  Even "standard" implementations did this.  The Unix System 
Laboratories library did not use templates but had its own template 
instantiations.  Microsoft did the same for their foundation classes.  This 
was recognized back in 1990 as a real problem that there  was not a standard 
re-use library for C++.  The problem is that implementing the ISO/ANSI 
standard langauge proved to be extremely complicated.  This is borne out by 
it taking eleven years for both open source and proprietary solutions to 
actually deliver the standard library.

So, now you know in part why C++ is so complicated.   Its history made it 
not nearly so "pure" an OO language and also delayed re-use libraries by 
about a decade.  Nevertheless, it still runs rings performance-wise around 
other more "pure" solutions.  It has, is, and probably always will be a 
pragmatic rather than an ideological language.  For those of us who have to 
get real product out on time and have the product be small and fast we owe a 
debt of gratitude to Bjarne Stroustrup.  It was Bjarne's dedication to make 
sure it "works" over theoretic purity which made C++ what it is today.
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