Summary
Looking for your best Fs, Fs, Fs, Fs and Fs regarding everyone's favourite (to use, or to moan about) language, C++. If you've got 'em, let me have 'em. The worst that can happen is you'll get a mention in the new book ...

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The structure of my new book, Breaking Up The Monolith is pretty much decided, but the content is yet to be "made so". This is particularly the case with the phrasing of the "big questions" I'll be addressing. Lacking in what might kindly be termed linguistic creativity I thought I would instead try and scab some from you, gentle readers. I'm keen to hear from anyone with good or bad experiences with C++.

Let me illustrate with one of each type, to get you started:

• Fact: - C++ has become "expert friendly", such that many sophisticated modern libraries would require a PhD in meta-programming to understand them (were it possible at all to digest their utterly opaque implementations).
• Failure: - The application of C++'s simplest and most significant mechanism, RAII, has failed to be provided to its full extent by library writers or applied to its full extent by users.
• Fallacy: - Propagation of support for C's nul-terminated character strings into the interface-level of C++ components has proven to be a great success.
• Falsehood: - Increasing the abstraction level leads to less efficient code.
• Furphy ⁽¹⁾: - The standard I/O mechanism is efficient, type-safe and easily extended.

Naturally, no one person will hold all of the above opinions. Indeed, I'm not at this point much interested in examining or debating any of the 5xFs that might be suggested, although I'll doubtless digest any arguments that may be brought forth in support. What I'm really looking for are clearly and succinctly expressed Fs, that tally with the material I'll be covering in the book, which would make bold points in the Preface.

Of course, I allow for the fact that some folks might mention ones that are outside the current scope of the book but that are sufficiently significant that I might amend the plan. :-)

Let rip ...

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Furphy is an Australian slang term that roughly means "a false rumour" (probably propagated by a galah who couldn't get his hand off it).

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About the Blogger

Matthew Wilson is a software development consultant and creator of the FastFormat, Pantheios and STLSoft libraries. He is author of the books Imperfect C++ (Addison-Wesley, October 2004) and Extended STL, volume 1 (Addison-Wesley, 2007), and is currently working on his third, Breaking Up The Monolith: Advanced C++ Design Without Compromise. He has published over 60 articles on C++ and other topics, and has served as columnist and contributing editor for C/C++ Users Journal. Matthew believes that code should be discoverable and largely self-documenting, and lives up to that by being a hopeless documentor. He can be contacted via http://www.imperfectcplusplus.com/ or stlsoft@gmail.com.