Tony Smith wrote:
> No-one needs the 'power' that C gives you these days, it's all
> libraries, web apps and front-ends for SQL databases.

That's baltantly wrong, of course.  Sure there are a lot of web apps and
such where CPU power is not the limiting factor.  But to say that this is
never the case is rediculous.  Maybe you don't ever run a programs that you
have to wait on because of the sheer number of calculations required, but
that doesn't make it true for everyone.  Programs in that catagory for me
include the Eagle auto router and some image processing utilities.

I recently wrote a program for a customer that performs 50000 relaxation
passes on 10s to 100s of polar grids.  The total run time can be 10s of
minutes or more, depending on the number of thingies installed at a
particular site.  While a hour per customer site installation once is
acceptable, I'm sure the field folks would love it to be faster.

That's just a few examples of the many out there, although only a single one
disproves your blanket statement.

> You don't need C for that.

True.  The language is not the issue as long as it's a truly compiled one
intended for general purpose from the start.  As long as you understand what
goes on underneath and don't do something stupid, most truly compiled
languages with modern compilers will give you about the same performance.


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