bs@alice.UucP (Bjarne Stroustrup) (05/07/86)
Douglas Robinson writes: > I have heard mixed reviews of C++. Yes it seems that it would be a > great productivity tool PROVIDING you have a 32Bit CPU and a compiler > with LARGE amounts of capacity (I've heard of people exhausting certain > limits on the 4.2BSD compiler on a VAX...). Yes, the C++ translator was designed on the assunption that you had at least a CPU in the 68K or 80286 class with a megabyte of memory available. In most cases half a meg will do. However, I would hate you to get the impression that C++ compilers display Ada-like greed for ``resources''. The only C compiler limit I have heard broken is the amount of tree space set aside for expression evaluation. This can be broken if you use deeply nested inline functions. You don't have to call inlines from within inlines from with inlines from within inlines etc. and the tree space limit can be extended. It was simply set with the assumption that expressions were written by humans. > Some of us still have to be > able to live with 16Bit processors (INTEL 8088/86/286) and some of us > even have to live in the small model domain (strictly 16 bit addressing > with split I/D). Not everyone has a spare VAX in their basement (YET :->). The C++ compiler use the large model on a 80826, the compiled C++ need not. > Douglas Robinson jobs don't kill programmers, programmers kill jobs > The Foxboro Company > MS 04-3A cybvax0!foxvax5!dbr > 38 Neponset Avenue > Foxboro, MA 02035 617/543-8750 Bjarne Stroustrup (AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill)