[SDL] Off-Topic: Quake II Ported to HTML5

[David Olofson]

On Thursday 08 April 2010, at 23.14.43, Mason Wheeler <masonwheeler at yahoo.com> 
wrote:
[...]
> x = construct_object()
> ObjectContainer.Add(x)
> ...
> //End of block - 'x' is automatically... oops!

That's why you have refcounting or similar. ;-)

That indeed has a bunch of issues, but it's quite handy if you want 
deterministic behavior and minimal "garbage collection" delays for optimal 
memory footprint.


[...]
> >More useless typing.  Even more useless typing if you want a pointer to
> >a pointer, or a pointer to an array, or an array of pointers, or a
> >pointer to an array of pointers, etc..
> 
> I'm sorry, but that's extremely vague and sounds more like ranting than
> anything useful.  How is writing out information that makes a program
> easier to read when you come back to it (or when someone else has
> to maintain it) "useless"?

+1

(Not that I'm a Delphi fan specifically - although I have developed Delphi 
applications, and I don't think the language is all that horrible; just mildly 
annoying, mostly because I'm so used to C and C++... ;-)

I'm really not a fan of nonsensically wordy syntax, but being able to clearly 
express your intentions is very useful, both for trapping things at compile 
time, and for making the code more human readable. Even some redundancy to 
help catch typos can be warranted at times.

Why?

Because most of us spend *much* more time messing with existing code (fixing 
bugs, adding features, reusing old code in new projects etc), than writing 
brand new code. Some extra typing may cost a second or two per line, but if it 
can save hours down the road, can you really afford to "save" those 
seconds...?


[...]
> (And it definitely makes *reading* good code easier.  You can't say that
> about anything from the C family.)

That might, to some extent, be an effect of "us" C/C++ programmers taking 
pride in writing "clever" code. ;-)


-- 
//David Olofson - Developer, Artist, Open Source Advocate

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