Gabriele Svelto (gabriele.svelto@gmail.com) on 3/10/08 wrote:
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>What I find funny about C++ is that while people claim that it is a multi paradigm
>language there seems to be "one true way" of writing C++ code and using only part
>of its feature set (C-with-classes for example) is frowned upon.

I've never come across that. I've seen people who resist some of the funkier stuff because they find it too complicated to think about, but there's nothing wrong with that, and not knowing e.g. how to implement the libraries in Boost certainly doesn't prevent you from using them effectively.

It would be a shame for C programmers to not want to use C++ as a drop-in substitute, adding little bits of C++ here and there as they grew comfortable with them, because someone thought they should follow the "one true way" you describe or not use it at all. Even without the OO stuff, templates can be a handy addition to C programs that can result in faster code even without heroic optimisations (e.g. C++ sort() vs. C qsort()). Operator overloading, function overloading, etc., are also nice -- I often wish OpenGL had a simple C-with-C++-function-overloading interface so all the function names didn't have to encode type information in them. The containers, too, can be handy. None of that requires the use of OO to be of benefit, and most of it doesn't create unexpected code.