Re: [RFC] Convert builin-mailinfo.c to use The Better String Library.

"Steven Burns" [off-list ref] writes:

The C++ community in general suffers a lot from the NIH Syndrome.
Matrixes, Strings, Vectors, everybody creates their own which are always, or 
course, superior to what's already available.

Again, is not the language's fault, a language is just a language.
It's the way it has been driven.

Having loose wires instead of a brake pedal in a car because the user
might prefer to brake with his teeth or by wiggling his backside or
building any other contraption of his own invention is a design
mistake.  Especially when we are talking about public transportation
with changing drivers.

Making a language huge and bloated in order to be able to use the
language itself for defining a set of basic data types is just
masturbation.  C++ has the most complicated set of implicit
conversions from any language in the world, and what for?  It is
modeled for being able to create a user-defined "complex" type which
behaves almost as well as Fortran's.  Too bad that this mostly means
everybody will define his own type (well, at least we have seen two or
three different library "standards" by now), and that the implicit
conversion rules and chains are appallingly wrong for a number of
other possible user-defined arithmetic types.

-- 
David Kastrup