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From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: The Universal Language (Was Re: Efficient Fortran)
Message-ID: <23950@megaron.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 6 Aug 90 23:47:14 GMT
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 79

In article{  <1360@fs1.ee.ubc.ca> mikeb@coho.ee.ubc.ca (Mike Bolotski) writes:
>
>I apologize for the personal nature of the attack on Herman and David.
>In view of the high quality of discussion on this newsgroup, it was
>completely uncalled for.

Thank you, Mike.  I think many of us have trouble remembering that we
are writing to real people out there in net land, and tend to get
carried away.  It has happened to me many times, and I wasn't
completely innocent in this exchange.  (I did make a crack about lack
of imagination...)

>I would be interested in the opinion, as I still believe that a
>universal language isn't a good idea. 

Well there are two different questions here: whether a universal
language is possible, and whether it is a good idea.  I don't think
you can answer the second until you know what a universal language is.
First, I doubt that there will ever be any formally specified language
the size of, say Ada or smaller that can make a true claim to
universality (although we can't really know for sure).

But there is another approach to universality.  The existence of
English plus current programming languages plus all the specialized
notations of mathematics, logic, linguistics, chemistry, and many
other areas show that a fairly universal language is possible.  I
don't think there is anything inherently wrong with saying that all
this is one language.  Of course it is not a very cohesive or elegant
language.

Given this view of what a universal language is, the question becomes
``to what extent can this hodgepodge be unified and streamlined?''.
The question becomes a quantitative rather than a qualitative one.
There is a lot of work being done today attempting to unify various
programming language paradigms.  And other work studying the
underlying nature of language and what different languages have in
common (both natural and artificial language).  If these researchers
can come up with a small set of basic underlying principles then it
may be possible to use these principles to bring together many of the
divergent languages being used.

This unification is not a process of throwing out the specialized
features of various languages, rather it involves finding
relationships among the various specialized features, subsuming them
with more general features.  This has already been done in different
contexts.  For example, functions and relations were once separate
concepts, but now both may be thought of as sets.  (Actually, I'd like
to discredit that particular model, but that's another story ;-)
Similarly, plane geometry and algebra were once considered completely
unrelated, but now geometry can be done in algebra in a cartesian
plane.  In these and many other cases, the unification of different
languages gave great insights into the problem domains that the
languages were meant for.

Unix has shown pretty conclusively the benefit of combining different
languages.  C alone would not have been adequate for all the work that
has been done, but add lex, yacc, shell, make, awk, and other
languages and you have an extremely powerful system.  The power comes
not just from the existence of the separate languages, but from the
combination.  There would be little point to lex and yacc if you could
not combine them conveniently with C.  If the shell could not call C
programs or make could not invoke shell commands, a lot of power would
be lost.  And there would even be considerable power lost if C could
not run shell commands.

Even so, I don't think anyone would call this collection a single
language.  But maybe with enough ingenuity something similar can be
designed that is so cohesive that it _could_ be called a single
language.  I have often come up with a problem working in one of the
above languages that could have been easily solved if I'd had more
direct access to some other language.  Maybe a universal language
would involve a lot of little sublanguages, but all fully integrated
into a single entity, so that you are not committed to a single
sublanguage just because you chose to start in that language.
-- 
					David Gudeman
Department of Computer Science
The University of Arizona        gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
Tucson, AZ 85721                 noao!arizona!gudeman