Comparing Programming Languages Part 1 Scalar Ranges
Overview It is often asserted that all general purpose programming languages can solve the same set of problems. This means that no one programming language has functional advantages over any other programming language. That assertion is only mostly true, which means it is false. For example, weakly typed languages can perform and make use of implicit type conversions while strongly typed languages cannot. Strongly typed languages must employ explicit conversions to achieve a similar effect. The purpose of this article is to begin discussing some of the things that are difficult in one commonly used language and relatively easy in another. Scalar Ranges Programming languages derived from Pascal syntax allow scalar types and subtypes to be defined by the programmer, while programming languages derived from C syntax do not allow the programmer to define scalar types or subtypes. In C++, for example, a class must be declared encapsulating the behavior of a scalar type w...