“Close to the hardware” seems to be a guiding principle in designing C++. Is it fair to say that C++ was designed more bottom-up than many languages, which are designed topdown, in the sense that they try to provide abstractly rational constructs and force the compiler to fit these constructs to the available computing environment?
Bjarne: I think top-down and bottom-up are the wrong way to characterize those design decisions. In the context of C++ and other languages, “close to the hardware” means that the model of computation is that of the computer—sequences of objects in memory and operations as defined on objects of fixed size—rather than some mathematical abstraction. This is true for both C++ and Java, but not for functional languages. C++ differs from Java in that its underlying machine is the real machine rather than a single abstract machine.
The real problem is how to get from the human conception of problems and solutions to the machine’s limited world. You can “ignore” the human concerns and end up with machine code (or the glorified machine code that is bad C code). You can ignore the machine and come up with a beautiful abstraction that can do anything at extraordinary cost and/or lack of intellectual rigor. C++ is an attempt to give a very direct access to hardware when you need it (e.g., pointers and arrays) while providing extensive abstraction mechanisms to allow high-level ideas to be expressed (e.g., class hierarchies and templates). That said, there has been a consistent concern for runtime and space performance throughout the development of C++ and its libraries. This pervades both the basic language facilities and the abstraction facilities in ways that are not shared by all languages.
Source of Information : Oreilly - Masterminds of Programming
Bjarne: I think top-down and bottom-up are the wrong way to characterize those design decisions. In the context of C++ and other languages, “close to the hardware” means that the model of computation is that of the computer—sequences of objects in memory and operations as defined on objects of fixed size—rather than some mathematical abstraction. This is true for both C++ and Java, but not for functional languages. C++ differs from Java in that its underlying machine is the real machine rather than a single abstract machine.
The real problem is how to get from the human conception of problems and solutions to the machine’s limited world. You can “ignore” the human concerns and end up with machine code (or the glorified machine code that is bad C code). You can ignore the machine and come up with a beautiful abstraction that can do anything at extraordinary cost and/or lack of intellectual rigor. C++ is an attempt to give a very direct access to hardware when you need it (e.g., pointers and arrays) while providing extensive abstraction mechanisms to allow high-level ideas to be expressed (e.g., class hierarchies and templates). That said, there has been a consistent concern for runtime and space performance throughout the development of C++ and its libraries. This pervades both the basic language facilities and the abstraction facilities in ways that are not shared by all languages.
Source of Information : Oreilly - Masterminds of Programming
|
|
0 comments
Post a Comment