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From: Andrew Reilly <areilly...@bigpond.net.au>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.java.programmer
Subject: Re: some personal rambling on java the lang
Date: 22 Oct 2010 21:25:22 GMT
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On Fri, 22 Oct 2010 11:27:40 +0100, Tim Bradshaw wrote:

> On 2010-10-22 05:05:57 +0100, Rob Warnock said:
> 
>> And if your particular CL implementation doesn't have such, it only
>> takes a page or so of C API (or CFFI) glue to add them...
> 
> Yes, I know this & equivalent things can be done for Java of course, or
> probably any language (I bet there were people who did bit-twiddling in
> prolog).  But that's still quite different than C which is really
> designed for that kind of bit-twiddling (I mean, historically, it really
> was designed for just that sort of thing).

The big thing about C (even more than C++) is the ability/ease to compile 
"unhosted" and write code that can be booted on "bare metal" with 
something less than a page of (boiler-plate) assembly between START and 
main().

Writing device drivers or network protocol stacks or file format readers 
and writers: history shows that this can be done perfectly adequately in 
lisp or Java or Oberon or Ada or whatever (even C++).  Very few of these 
languages have so little run-time mechanism that bring-up on bare metal is 
easy enough to be considered trivial.

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew