BV> ........ Do you have any idea why C has become so popular ?

 BV> It's simple really and I'm surprised that someone like yourself

 BV> hasn't realised it. It is because it is _perceived_ to be hard to

 BV> learn. The dickheads think that if it is hard to learn then it must

 BV> be good.



Ah, so that's the real reason.. and I thought I chose C over Pascal

cos the pirate bookshop had copies of the TC1.0 books to match the

floppies from the pirate software shop, but they didn't have the

Pascal books...



 BV> The reality is that it doesn't matter what you write a

 BV> program in, so long as it does exactly what you want and it is easy

 BV> for you to do it.



oddly enough, my first serious app used alterable function pointers

in C, which would have been rather difficult to do in the Pascals

of the day, so it seems I lucked out at the pirate bookshop .

(That app became much nicer when C++ appeared, btw. It was a bit of

a kludge in C.)



 BV> Why do you think dBase was such a hit a few years

 BV> ago. While the idiots were all rushing out buying their $29.99 Pascal

 BV> compiler, the smart ones were spending $399 on dBase and earning a

 BV> fortune from it.



Lot of it about. We're still using a couple of such apps from years

ago, warts and all, done in Clipper.



 BV> Nope. The world is continually evolving and changing. Fads come and go,

 BV> you choose tools that you feel will help you NOW and use them to build

 BV> on your knowledge base. It's a little like electronics. Imagine if

 BV> you were teaching someone the trade now. Would you still teach them

 BV> the basics like electron flow, resistors, capacitors, transistors ?

 BV> Why ? Everything is in LSI's now and it is possible to build a circuit

 BV> without knowing exactly what it is doing. You just plug the black

 BV> boxes together.



Poor analogy - people taught the lsi way sometimes think they Know

Electronics, and fall foul of simple stuff. A simple example:

without a background of electron flow, inductance, capacitance, and

a bit of transmission line theory, how is one expected to

understand the hows and whys of a low impedance power supply for a

microprocessor system? Or an audio amp?



Another example: I had a phone call from a non-elec engineer at the

uni the other week. He's putting together a telemetry box to sit on

a reef and report tide heights from a pressure transducer. He has

an excellent grasp of micros, a/d converters, transducers, solar

panels, regulators, batteries, waterproofing, and electrolysis, but

was completely lost when he found that the low band radio was

interfering with everything in sight when it transmitted. Didn't

know what a feedthrough cap was, and didn't understand its

importance when I explained it. Took me twenty minutes to gently

suggest that the elec engineers in the building 50 metres away from

him might be able to offer a hint or two (I'd have loved the work,

but they don't pay lavishly, and my spare time is sorta booked

out).



Yr comments re Delphi are most interesting, ta. As I haven't even

written a Win app in C yet (although I've had a Win C compiler

for quite a while), and since programming is a minor sideline for

me (dammit!), I'll sit back and wait.



Cheers



ps what the heck is this thread doing in a local echo? Avtech needs

more techs!





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