Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!eos!shelby!neon!pallas
From: pallas@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Joe Pallas)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.nfs
Subject: Re: Writing Postscript code....
Message-ID: <1990May31.215127.15764@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 31 May 90 21:51:27 GMT
References: <23683@bellcore.bellcore.com> <1990May30.030703.462@Neon.Stanford.EDU> <53478@wlbr.IMSD.CONTEL.COM>
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Lines: 40

In <53478@wlbr.IMSD.CONTEL.COM> mh@awds26.imsd.contel.com (Mike
Hoegeman) writes:

[quote of my saying the NeWS Class system is evidence of PostScript's
 inadequacy]

>Well... you can make this rather flippant comment about almost any programming
>language. For example:

>	"The very existence of the C standard library is evidence of C's
>	inadequacy as a programming language."

>Which is a pretty ridiculous statement. 

Yes, I agree---because using standard library does not change the
fundamental model of computation the way the NeWS
objects-in-PostScript system does.  The fundamental operation in the
NeWS class system is "send message", which is not a PostScript
operation.  The fundamental operation in the use of a C library is
"call function", which is a C operation.

But this is not worth arguing over.

>How have you been burned? This is, for the most part, genuine
>curiousity. I'd be interested in hearing something more specific.

I've been burned by dynamic binding, which makes it practically
impossible to write recursive procedures with named own variables.
I've been burned by stack overflow/underflow because some procedure
didn't leave the stack the way some other procedure expected.  I've
been burned by STATIC binding, because Adobe encouraged people to use
the "bind" operator, which improves performance by completely changing
the semantics of the language.  I've also been burned by the
machine-dependent limit on the length of an executable array literal,
when I had some code being generated by a program.

All of this is just the language, excluding the times I've been burned
by machine-dependent graphics operations.

joe