> I mean, it's simple, but brain-damaged?
Linking is not a hard problem at all. For the last 40 years with a sane language you'd say "I depend on A, B and C" (in any order) and often that would happen implicitly as part of writing your code rather than having to screw around with some abortion of a build system as in C or C++ land. Things would just work, and quickly at that; the fact that there was a linking step would hardly ever even enter your conscious awareness with Turbo Pascal for example.
By contrast, in C and C++ you get:
- Often horrendously slow linkage, so slow in fact that it can dominate build times.
- Massive complexity. Contrary to what you claim, linking with C isn't simple at all (although it ought to be, especially considering how stupid it is!). Have you ever looked at a C linker manpage or obj format description? Also, because linker performance of GNU ld is so abysmal, people have written several replacements (gold, lld) and there are all sorts of exciting issues associated with getting different compilers talk to different linkers on different platforms/toolchains as well. There is an enormous cottage industry of (mostly terrible) tools around linking in C. And this complexity is before we even try anything like LTO or cross-platform builds.
- Lots of exciting challenges for even the most trivial tasks ("I'd like a statically linked artifact, please", "I'd like to be able to debug this, please").
- You need to specify link order, and the order matters and can introduce obvious as well as more subtle failures.
- Lots of random weirdness (e.g. djb errno patches).
- Little gems like this:
> echo $'#include\nvoid hello() {puts("hello world!");} int main() { hello();}' | gcc -xc - && ./a.out
hello world!
vs
> echo $'#include\ninline void hello() {puts("hello world!");} int main() { hello();}' | gcc -xc - && ./a.out
/usr/bin/ld: /tmp/ccYdbjTB.o: in function `main':
:(.text+0xe): undefined reference to `hello'
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
How is any of this not braindamaged? Have you never used (a possibly ancient) language which did not suffer from any of these problems?
> your English translation suffers the same problem as the code
Sorry, I wasn't very clear here: what I meant to convey is that C syntax for logical operations is bizarre and unreadable. Why the bogus parens after the if? Why replace "not" with a weird symbol that does not in any way traditionally relate to logical negation and is moreover super easy to overlook?
> Use the pre-processor that you complained about
If someone sets my leg on fire, am I supposed to feel grateful when he pisses on it?