[philluminati]

C is a beautiful language. I agree that with the assertion that it doesn't do abstraction. It only does two things:

* group code into functions * group primitives into structures.

However, it's simplicity is it's strength. You can write clean, standardised code in it. It's clean and simple. It's obvious. It's far too easy to make mistakes in C++ from bad type conversion or bad inheritance models (e.g. forgetting to virtualise something) to confusing subtly broken operator overloading that's counter-intutative.

C++ does render a C a little bit redundant. The abstractions it provides not only make programs more maintainable, but that additional intent allows compilers to potentially generate faster and more portable multithreaded code. We hit a point where C programs compile to faster/better assembly than a human can write. I expect that soon we'll hit a second wall where the C++ compilers can write faster/better multithreaded code than a C programmer could write or optimise and a C compiler couldn't support that directly "intent" as the language doesn't facilitate describing it.

However that point hasn't come yet. C still benefits from being clean, easy to interpret (from a human perspective) and is a demonstration of how to design a new language.

C++ is a federation of languages but writing pure C with gcc is better than g++ with all warnings enabled IMHO.