TH>> The way I read it it says they are _unable_ to jump to C++.
 PG> Thanks, that is what I had meant.  (And I meant no offence to anyone,
 PG> although I DO stand by the assertion.  BTW I also apologise to
 PG> Jonathan, certainly your postings here DO show that you have an
 PG> excellent grasp of OOP.)  In 10 years of consulting, I really have
 PG> not meant any C programmers that have made the jump successfully.  I
 PG> really do think that the more experience one has in C, the less
 PG> effective one will be in C++.
There's certainly a lot of obstinate people Out There.  I hope that Thomas 
won't mind me holding him up as an example, but his posts in this thread are 
an excellent case in point.  He exclaims about how "everyone who knows C 
stick with it and skip the crappy C++", but his explanation of why a 
particular C++ idiom doesn't work for him in another message reveals that he 
deliberately limits himself to coding in C++ exactly the same way that he 
codes in C (automatic variable declarations at the start of blocks, instead 
of nearer the point of first use as the C++ language allows).  So one of the 
reasons that he so obviously dislikes C++ is due to a limitation, entirely 
self-imposed, to stick to the C paradigms, which in turn results in him 
cutting himself off from many C++ programming techniques.  No wonder he never 
sees any of the benefits of the language.  He makes it a deliberate policy 
never to look.
And that's a shame, because declarations near to point of first use is one of 
the features of the C++ language that was *designed* to help avoid some 
common C programming pitfalls, and one that, in my experience as a 
professional programmer who has had to maintain hundreds of thousands of 
lines of other people's C++ code, achieves its purpose admirably.
 ¯ JdeBP ®
--- FleetStreet 1.19 NR
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