C++ Expert Gets A+ in Foresight
In November of 1997, said Koenig, the C++ standard received unanimous
support, and final ratification was approved in mid 1998. Despite some
skepticism Koenig has encountered from programmers that complain of
difficulties, he said, "Anything is hard if it's poorly taught."
Koenig went on to review three examples of code that didn't work on
compilers available to him two years ago, but now, these same examples
work on several widely available applications. His first example was
concatenating a list and array, the second was determining palindromes, and
the third was a compiler that could count the number of times a distinct
word appeared in a given file.
Koenig said that, along the way, he learned a lot about design. One lesson he
shared was that "when you do something, and it does what you want, you
sometimes find that what it does is not really what you wanted." Koenig
discussed various ways to play with and tweak C++ code.
Although Koenig refrained from making any product recommendations, he did
note that "there is at least one implementation available that claims to
support the entire standard" and that many other implementations were very
close. Koenig said the standard is "worth using and it is teachable."
Koenig went on to say that "because of the work of many people, C++
programming is now easier and more enjoyable than it has ever been."
Furthermore, he continued, programmers do not have to worry as much about
vendors trying to lock them into proprietary features.
So, are we having fun yet? Koenig had this to say: "I am - how about you?"
