Alan,

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 10:02:58 -0000, Alan B. Pearce wrote:

> >It's only counter-intuitive if you learn C *after* working
> >with other high-level languages.  But the reality is that
> >C isn't a high-level language.
> 
> I seem to recall people calling it a "high level assembler", and when looked
> at like that, then it makes a lot more sense.

When I first encountered it, I called it "An assembler for a machine that doesn't exist" and although I was 
being a bit unkind, the parts that aren't like that seem to be horribly confusing to anyone trying to learn 
it.  In my opinion (and the reason I didn't go further and learn it properly) it didn't get any closer to 
solving the problem than assemblers did, so it wasn't a high-level language, but it didn't let you control the 
actual hardware (registers and so on) in the way an assembler did.  So what was the point?  It seems to me to 
be more difficult to learn, understand and read than both assemblers and high-level languages.  OK, so perhaps 
an experienced expert can make it sing and dance, but a trainee programmer having to follow up and change the 
tune would be swamped, and that makes for bad commercial sense in a programming office when developing, for 
example, an invoicing and stock-control program.  It may be good for writing operating systems (I've been 
told) but how many of the millions of programmers out there do that?

(Shields up, Mr.Sulu! :-)

Cheers,



Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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