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by nineteen999 2309 days ago
> How many other languages have a Turing complete sublanguage built into them just to handle templating?

On the bright side, C++ doesn't have obscure keywords like "cdr" and "car" that refer to specific hardware elements of an obsolete computer built in 1954.

3 comments

Car and cdr are a shallow critique of Lisp, the equivalent of "omg, significant whitespace" critique of Python.
Significant whitespace is more of an issue than what two functions should be called.

Significant whitespace means that we can't reliably use a traditional whitespace-insensitive diff to to compare changes in Python code that seriously change its meaning, such as change how many statements are in the scope of an if.

I was aiming for funny and accurate, not deep. Sad, for some, I guess that its heyday is long past, and that it will never ever rise to compete even with C/C++ commercially again, no matter how hard some people kick the dinosaur corpse.
No, C++ has obscure keywords like << which mean vastly different things, and can change, based on some invisible context.
Nope, only trap representations, in case you are using an Itanium for some reason.
Trap representations are an abstraction though, even if IA64 is one of the very platforms where they are used. CAR and CDR are literally named after CPU registers of the IBM 704.