Linked by MOS6510 on Thu 10th Jan 2013 23:25 UTC
"For years I've tried my damnedest to get away from C. Too simple, too many details to manage, too old and crufty, too low level. I've had intense and torrid love affairs with Java, C++, and Erlang. I've built things I'm proud of with all of them, and yet each has broken my heart. They've made promises they couldn't keep, created cultures that focus on the wrong things, and made devastating tradeoffs that eventually make you suffer painfully. And I keep crawling back to C."
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Member since:
2006-05-20
In Java, your class extends Comparable, then provides a definition of comparesTo(). You can now use your class with anything that wants to sort or search. You could argue the difference is just semantics or syntactic sugar. Still, the concept and syntax of function pointers is considerably more difficult to understand, and results in code that isn't as checkable by the compiler and can cause really wacky things to happen if you mess it up. In C, if I accidentally pass my string compare function to qsort while I'm trying to sort an array of ints, the program will compile and run, and then screw up badly at runtime.