C++ equivalent to spaghetti code

[Campy Happer]

Hello all,

I would like to bring to your attention a concept
and a term for it that I think is long overdue.

But first: In the bad old days of programming,
before subroutines were even available,
people used to write "spaghetti code", which
was an unreadable, unmaintainable mess of
"goto" statements.

With the increased availability of more
languages such as Pascal and C, and the
focus in programming courses on the importance
of modularity and abstract data types,
one might have thought that the days of
commonplace incomprehensibl e code were over,
or at least that the worst case scenario
in average code was improved.

In the case of C++, this is not so.
C++, with its multiple inheritance,
templates, and vastly bloated class libraries
such as STL and Boost, which permit and
seem even to require illegible coding practices
in which 5-deep derived classes are not
unlikely, has led to the C++ equivalent
of spaghetti code.

But how to describe it? Commonly people
simply call it "bad coding practices" but this
is too general. It's like calling a traffic accident
"bad driving practices". What then is the
term for an "accident" in C++? To describe this
build-up of tangled incomprehensibl e bloat,
I shall propose a new term:
C++ plaque.

It is similar to the plaque build-up in
Alzheimer's insofar as it impairs memory,
makes the programmer confused about
what is located where and what day it is.
In addition, when C++ plaque accumulates,
it decreases the programmer's ability
to function in his/her daily work life, ergo
anything (s)he produces will be much more
likely to crash, e.g. KDE.

Fight code pollution by not polluting.

C++ plaque: The cure is within you.

Thank you for your attention.

[Pete Becker]

On 2008-07-23 03:42:29 -0400, James Kanze <ja*********@gm ail.comsaid:

On Jul 22, 7:21 pm, Ben Pfaff <[e-mail] rd.eduwrote:

>James Kanze <james.ka...@gm ail.comwrites:

>>C doesn't have any support for decimal arithmetic, nor any means
of adding it comfortably.

>http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/open/n4060.pdf

Yes, I'd heard about this. But I wasn't too sure of its status,
and it isn't implemented by the compilers I regularly use.

C and C++ both have TR's for decimal floating-point in the works. They
were paused, waiting for IEEE-754R, a revision to IEEE-754 that
includes decimal floating-point, to be completed. That happened a month
or so ago, and now both TR's are moving forward.

--
Pete
Roundhouse Consulting, Ltd. (www.versatilecoding.com) Author of "The
Standard C++ Library Extensions: a Tutorial and Reference
(www.petebecker.com/tr1book)