Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!texbell!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: FORTH as a language for Professional programmers Message-ID: Date: 2 Jul 90 22:10:24 GMT References: <8406@znmeb.fps.com> Reply-To: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 27 In article <8406@znmeb.fps.com> znmeb@fps.com (Ed Borasky) writes: > Pascal, FORTRAN, FORTH, ASSEMBLER, ADA, MODULA are ALL better languages than > C. Better for what? Pascal is an excellent teaching language. Fortran is well adapted to numerical stuff. Forth is the best language for small projects with severe memory limitations. Assembler is absolutely necessary for some things, but it's no good for general purpose programming. I'm not sure what ADA is good for... it'd be sort of like a historical byway in the road to object oriented programming if the DoD didn't support it. Modula is a good general purpose language, and probably better than C, but the standard run- time library is way underdefined. > So how come so many more Bookstore Shelf Inches are devoted to "C"?? Because C is a nice intermediate-level language that can be cheaply implemented on small computers, while being large and general enough for systems programming on big ones. Pascal is too limited for systems work. Forth and assembler are too hard for most people. Fortran and ADA are too far from the hardware, and need too big a runtime... especially with the DoD's "NO SUBSETS" requirement. And modula is too late. There comes a tide in the affairs of men that, when taken at the flood, leads to success. C was in the right place and the right time to catch the tide. You can call it historical inertia if you like. -- Peter da Silva. `-_-' +1 713 274 5180.