Re: The (anti) C++ FQA Lite -- worth a look
Dombo <dombo@disposable.invalid> wrote:
The reason is that one of the design goals of C++ is to be (mostly)
backwards compatible with existing C code. If setjmp() and longjmp()
were removed, or printf() or the entire <stdio.h> were removed, many C
programs would fail to compile on a C++ compiler.
The advantage of compatibility with C isn't really that you can take
a C program and compile it with a C++ compiler. The major advantage
of this is that you can use C libraries directly from C++ code.
Let's face it: Probably at least 99% of libraries out there that
can be used in C++ are in C. Only a small minority hare made in C++.
There's an enormous advantage in being able to use them in C++ as well.
(It's also an advantage that if you are making a library, you can
make it such that it can be used as-is in C and C++ programs, even
as a precompiled library.)
Good examples of this are libraries like zlib and pnglib.
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