Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!kddlab!titcca!sragwa!wsgw!socslgw!diamond
From: diamond@csl.sony.co.jp (Norman Diamond)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: PL/I Grammar
Keywords: PL/I, C, grammar, parser
Message-ID: <10986@riks.csl.sony.co.jp>
Date: 23 Oct 89 04:16:21 GMT
References: <2956@usceast.UUCP> <1989Oct18.012237.548@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us> <464eadaa.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> <33398@cornell.UUCP>
Reply-To: diamond@ws.sony.junet (Norman Diamond)
Organization: Sony Computer Science Laboratory Inc., Tokyo, Japan
Lines: 35

In article <33398@cornell.UUCP> bard@cs.cornell.edu (Bard Bloom) writes:

>IF IF = THEN THEN THEN = ELSE ELSE ELSE = IF
>
>only in PL/I...  (I hope)

Only by an idiot in PL/I.  The value of a language comes from ALLOWING
a good programmer to write a good program.  Attempts to disable bad
programming usually cause side effects which are worse.  How recently
was the dispute in this newsgroup about Bondage & Discipline languages?

An idiot could write a C program with a variable named just _ (an
underscore).  The Extended Pascal committee didn't like this, so they
made a more restrictive and more complicated rule for where underscores
are allowed.  So if I'm debugging and want to create a variable for a
short time, intending to delete it later, I cannot call it "debug__a"
(two consecutive underscores are not allowed).  I cannot imagine any
programming style where I would want two consecutive underscores in a
finished program -- and neither could the rest of the committee so they
disallowed it altogether.

If you measure each language by the worst program that could possibly
be written by an idiot, then you will have to hate every language even
more than Dijkstra does.  You might as well get out of this profession
and leave it for the rest of us.

The English language is terrible too.  It permitted my boss to lie to
me.  All together now, let's criticize English and find a language where
lies are impossible.

-- 
Norman Diamond, Sony Corp. (diamond%ws.sony.junet@uunet.uu.net seems to work)
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