Eleanor McHugh <eleanor / games-with-brains.com> writes:

> On 26 May 2009, at 14:01, Reid Thompson wrote:
>> On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 09:01:02PM +0900, Srijayanth Sridhar wrote:
>>> "..but C is definitely the place to see how not to solve most  
>>> programming
>>> problems..."
>>>
>>> Unless, you want to write real low level code or another language,  
>>> like Ruby
>>> let's say. My vote for C if you don't already know it. It can be  
>>> tedious
>>> going from a rich language like Ruby, but hey, Buddha was a prince  
>>> before he
>>> was enlightened, and perhaps the same could happen to you too.
>>>
>>> Jayanth
>>
>> Agreed, since nearly *every* other language (not just ruby) designed  
>> to remedy
>>> "..but C is definitely the place to see how not to solve most  
>>> programming
>>> problems..."
>> is written in C

Not exactly.   Nearly every  implementation of a programming language
is written in themselves.  Eg. gcc is written in C.  SBCL is written
in Common Lisp.  Free Pascal is written in Pascal. The Karlsruhe
Modula-2 Compiler MOCKA is written in Modula-2.  Squeak the Smalltalk
implementation is written in Smalltalk. etc, etc, etc.

All these implementations only use C either to implement some low
level bootstrapping functions (in the same way that a unix kernel will
use some low level and bootstrapping routines written in assembler
instead of C), or include a compiler generating C code (since it's a
passable portable high level assembler) to be able to target various
processors without entering in their details.

Having an implementation of a language so handicapped that it cannot
be written in itself is rather rare.


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__