AW: [vorbis-dev] Reading OGG embedded in a pack file

[Andre Krause]

i cant agree with this. templates for example are a great thing i use
since 1993. i love them. but pointers, especially function pointers, are
a pain. 
and how can it be that in 2 weeks three different people (including me)
are flooding the mailing list with just the same problem, playing oggs
from an archive ? couldnt it be that just another variant of ov_open
could have avoided this? function pointers are just not comfortable.
and you are speaking like someone who does not respect the novice
programmers. learning and really understanding c / c++ is not a matter
of weeks, its a matter of at least months if not years. so if all
libraries would need the understanding of, for example,  function
pointers, a beginner would never take off programming in c. take me as
an example. i'm an average c++ programmer, who first learned basic and
then directly c++ without ever touching c or assembler. so i try to
avoid (still confusing) things like function pointers, dynamic type
casts and so on. i love to stick to templates, simple classes and
soetimes operator overloading. it is probably a fact of personal
development. if you grew up with c, you are very familiar with void* and
such. 

> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: owner-vorbis-dev at xiph.org 
> [mailto:owner-vorbis-dev at xiph.org] Im Auftrag von Lourens Veen
> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 6. Mai 2004 10:09
> An: vorbis-dev at xiph.org; Andre Krause
> Betreff: Re: [vorbis-dev] Reading OGG embedded in a pack file
> 
> 
> On Thu 6 May 2004 09:10, Andre Krause wrote:
> > Seems as it would be a very good idea to supply some sort of helper 
> > function that takes a filepointer (from an archive for
> > example) or a pointer to memory and a start- and end - 
> offsets to the 
> > positions where the ogg in that archive / memblocks starts 
> / ends and 
> > creates the necessary callback functions. For passionate c 
> programmers 
> > like you ogg develprs, callbacks seem to be the most 
> natural thing to 
> > solve such problems, but for beginner programmers or hobby game 
> > programmers its always a big barrier to start coding such. Ok, 
> > argument would be not to bloat the api, but whats the use of a lean 
> > api, when people who wish to use ogg in their programs first must 
> > start long threads or fiddle around be themselves to get an 
> idea whats 
> > going wrong and why ogg behaves so strange at first sight.
> 
> Give a man a fish...
> 
> Function pointers are a part of the C language, and they're a good 
> solution in this case. If you don't understand them, you should 
> educate yourself, or use a different language.
> 
> Otherwise, where does it end? Take C++. You could argue that 
> templates are hard to understand, so they shouldn't be used. And 
> ofcourse there is someone who doesn't understand object oriented 
> programming, so perhaps we should do away with those pesky class 
> things as well. Splitting things up in functions can also be 
> difficult, so perhaps we should just write everything in one big 
> main() function. And structured programming is hard too, so let's 
> just use a lot of GOTOs.
> 
> Okay, this is an extreme example ofcourse, but I think that teaching 
> people a language feature they don't understand is more useful than 
> just not using it. Of course it's not up to me to tell anyone what 
> to do, so if you want to write such a wrapper go right ahead. I 
> just think that the real problem isn't with the API.
> 
> Lourens
> -- 
> GPG public key: http://home.student.utwente.nl/l.e.veen/lourens.key
> 
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