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From: bzs@WORLD.STD.COM (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: C's sins of commission (was: (pssst...fortran?))
Message-ID: <9009211543.AA25709@world.std.com>
Date: 21 Sep 90 15:43:18 GMT
References: <&3646@lanl.gov>
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Jim Giles,

Have you looked closely at PL/I? I could probably dig up some old,
good, textbook recommendations. It has almost everything exactly as
you're describing (including the declaration of dynamic, recursive
objects.)

PL/I was definitely a bloated language with far too many rules
violating "the law of least astonishment", but it did have a lot of
good ideas. I think PL/I's main problem was that it was perceived as a
"pig" of a language in a time when resources were much more dear. The
compiler probably needed almost 1MB to run! (in a day when large
mainframes had 2MB of real memory and tried to run 100 logged in
users, this made it anathema at university computing centers and the
rest was history.)

The bit-oriented sizeof() is also in PL/I (which is what touched off
this remark.) In fact, it worked both ways:

	declare array fixed bin(31);

declared a 32-bit integer array (you always omitted the sign bit if
there was one, strange.) In fact you could declare any odd-sized
object pretty much:

	declare I fixed bin(11);

and it would do its arithmetic on such objects constrained to that
many bits. How? by turning all ops into function calls and linking
into a variable bit library...like I said, bloated...it took an expert
to get mostly native code out of PL/I as some small indiscretion might
make it turn all your code into library function calls.) But it did
work in all sorts of crazy situations (e.g. if you recompiled code
with bit-level declarations that didn't match the current hardware, it
would still work, albeit slowly.)

Anyhow, doomed to repeat it...as they say.

        -Barry Shein

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