Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!ncar!noao!arizona!gudeman From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: The Universal Language (Was Re: Efficient Fortran) Message-ID: <24013@megaron.cs.arizona.edu> Date: 8 Aug 90 05:07:54 GMT Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson Lines: 30 In article gaynor@paul.rutgers.edu (Silver) writes: >gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes: >> 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). > >I hold just the opposite opinion. Any `universal language' must be very small >but very versatile. The components of the language itself should be objects in >the language and easy to modify. This is an approach that I favor, but frankly it has been tried and has not born out its promise. By all means keep trying, but I'm a little discouraged... As to the size: there is a certain elegance in the notion that a universal language can be described as a very simple underlying system, and that all applications can be built on that framework. But as a practical matter I think you really want to standardize as much as possible, and include in the definition all of the useful sorts of notations. Otherwise this ``universal language'' is going to have huge numbers of dialects, all incomprehensible to the larger community. You don't really have a universal language, you have a language for describing other languages. Not that this is without value, but it is not a general purpose tool; it is highly specialized because it is only good for describing languages. -- David Gudeman Department of Computer Science The University of Arizona gudeman@cs.arizona.edu Tucson, AZ 85721 noao!arizona!gudeman