Re: C++ equivalent to spaghetti code

[peter koch]

On 20 Jul., 21:59, James Kanze <james.ka...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jul 20, 10:50 am, "Alf P. Steinbach" <al...@start.no> wrote:
>
> > * James Kanze:
> > > C was never really a good general purpose language.  It was
> > > never used (nor even usable) in commercial software, for
> > > example.
> > I'm not sure that statement is valid.
> > It would be very surprising, to say the least, if no or just a
> > very few commercial applications were written in C.
>
> There are certainly a few.  Way back when, however, the X/Open
> group proposed standardizing a form of Cobol (under Unix!)
> because C was felt to be unusable for business applications.
>
> At least certain types of business applications require some
> sort of decimal type.  If the language doesn't have it built in
> (as Cobol and PL-1 did), and it doesn't have operator
> overloading, expressions quickly become unreadable.  For those
> applications, at least, if the language doesn't have a built-in
> decimal type, and it doesn't have operator overloading, then
> it's really unusable for those applications (although you'll
> doubtlessly find some masocists doing it).
>
That was the case for "my" financial application. It had decimal-based
arithmetic, and writing expressions in C was
add(multiply(a,b),divide(c,d)) instead of a*b+ c/d. But as a lot of
the high-level code was written in our own, interpreted language
anyway it did not matter so much.

/Peter