C++

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C# is a pathetic imitation of C++ that removes the all the good features.






I really don't think you appreciate how revolutionary object oriented programming is and how VITAL it is for maintaining the code of highly complex programs. It you write a complex program like a video game using a procedural language like C(there are only 2 procedural languages that are still in use today: C and FORTRAN), you'd have to write many smaller simpler programs that your master program would run. If there's a bug in one of them that causes a runtime error, the problem will cascade through the entire program and fixing it will be a time consuming, painstaking task. With object oriented programming, you have modularity. So if there's a bug in one on module, it may cause runtime errors but the rest of the program can still work(at least partially)and fixing it is that much easier.

C++ is truly the most powerful, most general purpose programming language in existence. It spans all levels, from low level hardware interfaces to high level abstraction, anything a computer can do can be programmed in C++.

Such as...?

AspieRogue, to be fair you could theoretically program just about anything in any language. If I wanted to badly enough (and truth told it may not be a bad idea) I could write a gcc module for Ruby and compile native code from that. Actually the more I think about it the better that one seems.

C++ hits a sweet spot on the difficulty/abstraction curve for a lot of uses. I use it almost by default for a lot of things. It's not God.

Theoretically? Yes. IRL? Not a chance! The compilers and interpreters for high level languages like Ruby and even the Java VM are written in C++. I happen to know though that you cannot write a virus in Java, Python, or Ruby because viruses require pointers. Low level programming requires access to memory, like programming device drivers for example. Hardware access functions in languages like Ruby are not written in Ruby itself. So there you have it.

I understand your line of thinking, but I maintain that if there were a reason to make these things happen in e.g. Ruby, they could. You are correct that the API would have to be expanded to expose things to Ruby code that aren't currently exposed, but on Linux there is very little that cannot be done via sysfs/procfs anyway so that's everything outside the kernel proper right there. Sure it's not portable. Portability layer could be done in Ruby. Kernel itself could be done in Ruby. There's not a huge gulf between theory and reality in this case if someone had the impetus. Note that I'm not saying any of it would be a good idea

You are incorrect about viruses requiring "pointers".

Pointers and other forms of indirect addressing add flexibility to passing parameters to subroutines.

How would you like to plug in the value of a parameter to a local variable in each of its occurrences in a subroutine. Before indirect addressing was invented that is what one had to do.

ruveyn

Oh am I? Please do elaborate. FTP when I speak of "viruses" I am talking about self-replicating programs. Some people call those "worms", but I think that's a misnomer since all a biological virus can do is self-replicate. To create a program that self-replicates you need direct access to your memory(including your hard drive-hence file pointers).

You don't need pointers to read files, dude.

I remember barely about reading file and liked this possibility when learn about it. That give you a lot of possibilities

Not true. Higher level languages that have file read and write functions are calling much lower level functions that DO use pointers. A pointer is a variable that contains a memory address. To read a file your CPU needs to know where on your hard drive that data is located and where to START reading the data from.

You're also gonna need em if you're going to write a file at some arbitrary location in memory that may involve overwriting something else.... If you wanted to overwrite part of one file and then part of another the OS isn't going to let you do that. Self-replicating programs are quite a bit more complex than you think, brah.

I don't think you know what you're talking about. You seem to be confusing pointers (which are used to address memory in RAM) with disk sectors. But that's irrelevant - just because higher level languages are using low level features under the hood doesn't mean that you are using those features in the language itself.


...No they aren't, what's going on under the hood is irrelevant. I've written my own FAT32 filesystem in an embedded system, please don't treat me as if I don't know anything.

No, I am not confusing the two. A disk sector is a subdivision of a hard disk. Here is what msdn has to say about file pointers:




Now obviously you don't need pointers to RAM addresses to read and write files. But when it comes to self-replicating viral programs, the need for pointers(and not file pointers) has to do with they allow you to treat code as data. You could write a virus as a two part program with a "head" and a "tail". The cycle goes as the head writes the tail and the tail writes the head. C++ has a generic pointer that is not type specific. The head and the tail have pointers that reference each other.

But now I'd like to hear from MyFutreSelfnMe about how a virus can be written without pointers.

C# is fully objected oriented and was inspired by Java. I have to say, Java sucks because it's inflexible, pedantic, slow, and is particularly bad at user interfacing.

In addition to pointers, C++ retains the procedural aspects of C which makes writing user interfaces a lot easier and more efficient. If you have program that reads and processes user input it's SO much easier to do that with C++ and even python(using the interpreter)than with Java or C#. The void* pointer in C++ is very convenient as it offers the programmer a generic data type.

Yeah, genius, and how do you think it is represented under the hood? For a FAT filesystem it would be information about the current cluster, the current sector in the cluster, and the current byte offset of the sector, which is a structure specific to FAT that isn't intrinsic in any language, and certainly isn't related in any way to standard pointers. Memory isn't read from disk using a a simple pointer to an address as your previous posts seem to imply, it is read by sectors. But go ahead and tell me about how you knew all this already.


You said that by "virus" you mean "worm", correct? The ILOVEYOU worm was written in VBScript. Now will you concede that you don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about?

I don't appreciate AspieRogue's attitude. He brings up some points that would make for a valuable discussion, but then he approaches it like he already knows everything, which is clearly far from the case.

Geez! I was only curious. I don't claim to "know everything", so please enlighten me. Why do you have such a stick up your ass?