> > 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.


I originally wrote 'almost no-one', but changed it to see who'd bite.

'Blatantly' is a bit much, sure Eagle needs to run fast, but you're not the
one writing the auto-router.  Out of the thousand of Eagle users only one
needs C, and that's the author.  

It's also been true for a while that it's cheaper to buy more CPU power then
spend days fiddling with something to make it faster.  That offends people
too, but a new PC divided by your hourly rate is a small number.  Which is
better?

MS Office is a perfect example of utilising CPU power, rather than having
document saves being basically a memory dump with various abominations
tacked on over the years, now it's a bunch of XML files zipped up.  That's
better PCs, not so much better coding.

C is rarely needed these days.

PICs are the same, you have "slow cheap Pic + Assembler" vs "faster $ PIC +
compiler".  Not everyone needs assembler for PICs.

Tony

(and in reference to the subject line, BREAK is probably the dumbest idea
ever, every other language got switches right)

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