Subject

[Paulo Pinto]

On Thursday, 8 August 2019 at 10:29:36 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Wed, 2019-08-07 at 17:16 -0700, Walter Bright via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote: […]
>> 
>> Before ZTC++, C++ was a curiosity on unix platforms that was 
>> battling
>> neck-and-neck with Objective C. (The comp.lang.c++ and 
>> comp.lang.objectivec
>> newsgroups had about the same traffic volume.) After ZTC++ 
>> appeared, C++
>> boomed
>> and ObjC tanked (and was rescued from oblivion by Apple).
>
> Being in the UNIX (well Solaris) world at the time at UCL, C++ 
> was seen as interesting but in need of templates which it then 
> got (1990) and so became viable, and Objective C was seen 
> (possibly wrongly but still) as ramming Smalltalk and C 
> together badly and so not viable. Someone got a few NeXT 
> machines but they got put in a cupboard to gather dust: nice UI 
> paradigm, useless programming platform. Macintosh had already 
> taken hold in the HCI and media communities.
>
> I was teaching C++ to first year second term (first term they 
> did Scheme (1987 and 1988) or Miranda (1989 onwards) 
> undergraduates 1987 to 1992 – all dates ±1. We used the 
> Glockespiel compiler because CFront was an afront, and GCC was 
> not up to it. Students liked it and did very well. After 1990 
> anyway when we didn't have to do #define/void* hacks to create 
> data structures but could use templates.
>
> Of course templates with untyped parameters was an error, still 
> not fixed in C++20 – apparently Concepts got pulled out again.

Concepts are part of ISO C++20.

It was contracts that got pulled out during the Cologne meeting 
due to some last minute discoveries of a few semantic issues.