[PD] C++ for reusable dsp lib - or better use C?

[Mathieu Bouchard]

Le 2012-02-22 à 20:47:00, Krnk Ktz a écrit :

> Sorry, I'm no professional programmer (I don't think i'm even good at 
> it!) but it seems like you are describing a Turing Machine, which 
> includes every programming language.

Well... no. I'm talking about Imperative languages, which is a very broad 
category of languages that includes almost all languages in common use. 
That category includes executables, ASM, C, C++, Perl/Python/Ruby/Lua, 
Tcl, shell scripts, Java/C#, and even PureData.

Turing Machines are also in Imperative languages, but nearly all other 
Imperative languages are based on the idea of Von Neumann machine instead 
(in which the tape memory is replaced by the concept of RAM). This idea is 
refined differently by each language to structure the manner in which RAM 
is used and thought of. Almost no languages are based directly on the idea 
of Turing Machine.

Turing Equivalence doesn't mean every programming language is a Turing 
Machine, it means that every sufficiently complete programming language is 
able to express the same computations as every other sufficiently complete 
programming language. It doesn't say how fast it can possibly run, nor how 
short the programme is, nor how hard it was to write it. 
Turing-completeness is really just concerned with whether it's possible to 
compute a given thing at all with a given language.

> What matters is how you organise your code, how you think your program. 
> In the end, it will actually be the same - both C and C++ build to ASM. 
> However, C++ forces you to think of objects while C doesn't: that's 
> another way of thinking and therefore another paradigm.

C++ does not actually force you to do anything with objects. It's designed 
for seamless transition from C (unlike Java, for example, which does 
enforce objects). Therefore you can compile C programmes almost as-is, 
with occasional search-and-replace for minor details.

C++ introductory books might teach you to do everything with objects and 
with <fstream> and teachers might forbid you from using printf() so that 
you use <fstream>, but that's all ideology. The compiler has little 
opinion about the shape of your programmes apart from whether it compiles 
and detecting some gotchas that are actual bugs. For mistakes that aren't 
clearly mistakes, the compiler will just let you learn.

> That's how I have always seen languages: they try to help you to write 
> programs like you think them. Every language brings you new ways of 
> thinking programs. It seems also illogical to me to try thinking in a 
> way which is not the one your tool does.

The language is quite bad at preventing you from thinking in different 
ways, and sometimes it's quite bad at preventing you from writing in 
different ways. Structuring programmes in an OOP way is sometimes simply 
the best way of writing a C programme using C techniques. There is no hard 
barrier between the two, hardly a paradigm shift at all. C++ was created 
as a preprocessor for writing code that would have otherwise been OOP in C 
already, for use by people who expanded on the concept of Structured 
Programming in the same manner that people nowadays expand on the concept 
of OOP.

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| Mathieu BOUCHARD ----- téléphone : +1.514.383.3801 ----- Montréal, QC