Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: It looks like he's at it again! Message-ID: Date: 23 Jul 90 01:24:18 GMT References: <1990Jul21.004616.649@Stardent.COM> <388@e2big.mko.dec.com> Reply-To: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 29 In article <388@e2big.mko.dec.com> gillett@ceomax.dec.com (Christopher Gillett) writes: > Whoa! Slow down...pop a couple valium. I didn't see Karsh's comments > as indicative of *all* computer science types. His remarks were > about the typical computer scientist, not all of them. That's no less offensive. His remarks were about a certain stereotype of the computer scientist. About the stereotypical ivory tower type, not the typical average case. > Borland Industries makes a vast > majority of their money trading on the performance of their tools. And people trying to maintain portable programs curse them everyday. It's one thing to write a hot pascal compiler. It's one thing to define a superset of pascal. But writing a hot compiler that breaks the rules for well behaved programs (try running any Borland program under double-dos: there's NO reason a compiler should ever write straight to the screen memory!), and defines a language that's doesn't even include standard Pascal as a subset... Yeh, lots of people bought Borland tools. Just like lots of people bought the IBM-PC. In both cases it burned lots of people interested in portable programs for no good reason... it's one thing to write a non-portable program, but making it impossible to write portable ones is a whole other ball game. > Aha! Lets presume for a moment that you are truly a computer scientist, > and that you buy into all the stuff that computer "science" teaches. Which computer "science"? The real one, or the straw man Bruce Karsh and you keep bringing up. -- Peter da Silva. `-_-' +1 713 274 5180. 'U`