Matt posted:
I always heard dialet of programming language. Or implementation of a
programming language. What does it really mean? C++ is standardized
already, does it mean it doesn't have any dialets? But I have heard
Borland C++ is the implementation of C++ programming language. What
does it mean?
please advise. thanks!!
Just because we call them programming "languages" doesn't mean they've any
resemblance to real-life spoken languages!
Programming languages certainly don't have dialects.
You won't see:
for (;;) {}
and
fo' (;;) {}
There's a thing called the C++ Standard, which lays down the rules for how a
compiler deals with the code you write. If you write code that doesn't
violate anything in the C++ Standard, then you've got a Standard-compliant
code.
Now take C99, a programming language distinct from C++. If you write a
program in C99, have you written a program in a dialect of C++? No! We don't
use the word "dialect" in programming. Either the program is C++ Standard-
compliant or not. For instance, there's things that are legal in C99 that
are not legal in C++, like variable-size arrays. If you write a program that
defines a variable size array, then it will be a C99 Standard-compliant
program, and it won't be a C++ Standard-compliant program.
Now, it's possible to have code that is both C99-Standard compliant *and*
C++ Standard compliant. This perhaps is where you've got the notion of
"dialects", because conversely for instance *no* code will be both C++
Standard-compliant and Delphi Standard-compliant at the same time! So,
there's definitely a relationship between C++, C, C99, but I wouldn't use
the "term" dialects.
This particular newsgroup deals with C++ and as such the C++ Standard. We
don't talk about C nor C99 in here. In America, they say "football" in the
place of "American football", and in Brazil they say "nuts" instead of
"Brazillian nuts", well... here we say "Standard-compliant" instead of "C++
Standard-compliant".
So if we see the likes of:
int joke[number_entered_by_user];
then we're just going to say that it's non-Standard-compliant code.
Hope I've enlightened you a little!
-JKop
