Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!sunybcs!sbcs!bnlux0!bam
From: bam@bnlux0.bnl.gov (Bruce Martin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Runtime dimensioning and Pascal
Summary: Flame about Pascal.
Message-ID: <1539@bnlux0.bnl.gov>
Date: 9 Nov 89 21:57:10 GMT
References: <6354@merlin.usc.edu>
Reply-To: bam@bnlux0.UUCP (Bruce Martin)
Organization: Brookhaven National Lab
Lines: 30
To: ajayshah@aludra.usc.edu

In article <6354@merlin.usc.edu> you write:
>
>Pascal is the prettiest language in the universe, ...

You've got to be kidding!  Pascal is just about the ugliest, but never mind.

>...but declaring five matrix inversion routines is a little tedious.  
>Any ideas on how to get around this?

Yes.  Use a modern language that has *generics* (like Ada or Fortran-88),
rather than one whose designer confused the notion of "data type" with 
various other attributes (like aggregation) and expected all programmers
to put up with dependent compilation (or no separate compilation at all).

Seriously, Pascal is a very useful pedagogical toy that some people have 
unjustifiably tried to use as a real, general-purpose programming language.  
It was never designed to be one.

Most of the things I don't like about Ada are leftovers from Pascal,
but at least it was designed as a general-purpose language -- and it
lets you create processing abstractions (i.e. procedures) that are
*allowed* to be independent of any attributes (like dimension of arrays 
or precision) that just may happen to be irrelevant to the algorithm.

	    -/s/-					BAM
	Bruce A. Martin	
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