On Sat, 16 Jun 2007 21:19:57 -0500, Tom Ring
wrote:

You may not like C programmers in general. However, some of us document
our code (my "code" is probably 80% comments) and don't declare
(assuming they declare at all) our functions as void. Unless they
really are. Sorry about the sentence structure there, I am very tired,
and also watching F1 qualifying at the same time. CPU idle time
nonexistent.

Hi Tom,

Documenting code (any language, and even more so for "self
documenting" languages) is a necessary talent, and the first casualty
often abandoned to schedule.

This has nothing to do with "liking" C programmers in general;
however, C as a language is wholly inappropriate for a user's
interface to antenna design engines. The intersection of C
programmers and Antenna designers is so marginal that the focus on C
is six sigma to the left of the bell curve (and, of course, these
comments can be extended to assembler).

I've designed parsers and compilers - no easy chore certainly - and I
have enough experience in the matter to know that expressing the
user's need in BNF and pushing it through YACC would present something
vastly better than C; with the libraries stripped out, is nothing more
than simple conditionals and loops (and again, since the assembler set
for the 80x86, ASM could do that just as well). C programmers'
fluency through brute force attention does not elevate these opaque
libraries' troglodyte style.

With the advent of C++, things only got worse. I was doing that in
the late 80s and when Java came along, I jettisoned that baggage.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC