C++ flexibility?

[science man]

Hey guys out of personal interest I was wondering if you could me how flexible C++ is? I've heard it can technically do everything but other languages are more efficient at certain things such as web stuff. True? Is it really hard to write up a website in C++?

P.S. When I say website I mean any type of website.

[JLBorges]

> I've heard it can technically do everything

It can't do everything - for instance, we can't write a C++ program which solves the halting problem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis

However, C++ is Turing-complete. Most programming languages are Turing-complete; the set of problems that they can be used to solve is the same.

This list would give you an idea of the kind of programs that are written using C++. http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/applications.html

Primarily large infrastructure projects. Yeah, you are right - no pure websites in that list (though web infrastructure backbones figure prominently - Amazon, Facebook, Google ...)

[Duthomhas]

Science man is making a comparison between C++ and other languages, and as no language can solve the halting problem, it seems something of a non-answer to respond with information about it.

C and C++ were designed as general purpose languages that were applicable to low-level, compiled, systems programming and general native-code applications programming.

There do exist a couple of C/C++ interpreters that are very useful.

[science man]

There do exist a couple of C/C++ interpreters that are very useful.

By interpreters do you mean compilers?

[Duthomhas]

No, a compiler produces native executables.
An interpreter does not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreter_(computing)

http://www.softintegration.com/
http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cint
http://ups.sourceforge.net/main.html