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by kllrnohj 444 days ago
> The success of C's ability to let programmers create layers of abstractions is why C is the foundational language of the OS I'm using, as well as the browser I'm typing this message in.

What browser are you using that has any appreciable amount of C in it? They all went C++ ages ago because it has much better abstraction and organization capabilities.

1 comments

That's a fair point that I hadn't considered. I was developing C+objects as C++ was first being released in the mid-90s, and then using Borland's C++ compiler in the early 2000s, but never really thought about it as anything more than what its name implies: "C with some more abstractions on top of it".

Thank you for the correction, but I consider C++ to be just a set of abstractions built upon C, and, if you think about it, and none of those structures are separate from C, but merely overlaid upon it. I mean it is still just ints, floats, and pointers grouped using fancier abstractions. Yes, they're often nicer and much easier to use than what I had to do to write a GUI on top of extended DOS, but it's all just wrappers around C, IMO.

C++ is very definitely not just wrappers around C and it's pretty ridiculous to frame it like that. Or if you want to insist on that, then C doesn't exist, either, as it's just a few small abstractions over assembly.