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From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: C's sins of commission
Message-ID: <27476@megaron.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 14 Nov 90 15:06:20 GMT
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 53

In article  <-M.6315@xds13.ferranti.com> Peter da Silva writes:
]David Gudeman:
]> ...  Lists and trees are mental structures that
]> humans use to visualize things.
]
]While I'm generally in the bit-bangers camp, I must agree with Piercarlo here.
]The basic things that people work with are "chunks of data".

Well, I'm _not_ in the bit-bangers camp and never have been.  You have
to drag me kicking and screaming to get me anywhere near an assembler.
I _never_ look at the assembler output of my C code, and I prefer not
to program in C if I don't have to.  My favorite languages have no
obvious relationship between the language constructs and the object
code.  I even like interpreted languages.  Can we all stop assuming
that just because someone says that pointers can be abstract objects,
that this means the speaker doesn't know what an abstraction is?
Maybe I have an intuition here that you all are not seeing because you
refuse to posit the possibility even long enough to consider it.

My ideal language would have APL-style arrays, SETL-style sets,
Icon-style lists and strings (Lisp lists and strings are too low-level
for my taste), Prolog-style terms, Emacs-style buffers, associative
lookup tables, first-class everything, and lots of other things that
would horrify a bit-banger.  It would also have high-level pointers
with pointer arithmetic.  The pointers would be high-level in the
sense that they could not be implemented as simple addresses, nor
could pointer operations be implemented one-to-one as machine
instructions.  Bit-bangers would be as horrified by my pointers as
by my arrays.  Efficiency has _no_, I repeat _no_ influence on my
opinion about pointers.

Pant, pant.

And furthermore...

] Lists, trees,
]tries, and so on are methods of implementing these databases in efficient
]ways. There's nothing fundamental about them.

"tries"!?  Eek.  There is no relationship between tries and trees
except that tries are often visualized as trees.  Implying that these
are at the same level of abstraction is like implying that a list is
at the same level of abstraction as a linked list.  I'm not the one
having trouble seperating concept from implementation here.

Did the early linguists know that they were working with low-level,
machine-oriented representations when they started drawing sentence
diagrams as trees?
-- 
					David Gudeman
Department of Computer Science
The University of Arizona        gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
Tucson, AZ 85721                 noao!arizona!gudeman