Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!athene!pcg From: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Antonio Grandi) Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme Subject: Re: Whither Headeth Scheme? Message-ID: Date: 6 Mar 91 17:57:08 GMT References: <3604@dali> Sender: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP Organization: Coleg Prifysgol Cymru Lines: 58 Nntp-Posting-Host: aberdb In-reply-to: icsu8209@attila.cs.montana.edu's message of 5 Mar 91 04:14:16 GMT On 5 Mar 91 04:14:16 GMT, icsu8209@attila.cs.montana.edu (Glassy) said: icsu8209> A short history of programming languages. icsu8209> lisp->lisp-1.5->{mac|inter}lisp->CL... icsu8209> | icsu8209> (rebellion) scheme->r1rs->r2rs->r3rs->r4rs... Not so easy! You miss on Vincennes Lisp and Wisconsin (later Maryland) Lisp, which have been milestones too, and are direct descendants of Lisp 1.5. In particular Vincennes Lisp could, by some stretch of imagination, be seen as an ancestor of Scheme. You also miss, in another branch, NIL. icsu8209> algol-60->algol-68 icsu8209> | | icsu8209> | (rebellion) algol-W->pascal->modula-{1,2}-+ icsu8209> | | No, no. What happened was that when proposals for the the Algol X successor to Algol 60 were requested, Pascal and Algol 68 were submitted. Algol W was designed as a possible Algol X before Pascal, but later withdrawn in favour of Pascal which was the embodiment of a very small subset of Hoare's ideas in his "Notes on data structuring" paper in "Structured Programming". Modula is not a successor of Pascal alone; it was influenced heavily by Mesa which was influenced heavily by things like Alphard and Euclid. icsu8209> (offshoot) CPL oberon<----+ icsu8209> | | icsu8209> | (rebellion) BCPL This is not true either. CPL was meant to be another Algol X, and is one of the ancestors of Algol 68. BCPL was a "subset" of CPL (*B*asic CPL) meant to be used to boostrap CPL, i.e. as the implementation language of the CPL compiler. icsu8209> | | icsu8209> | (offshoot) B->C->C++... C++ is a successor of Algol 68 and Simula 67 as much as of C. icsu8209> | icsu8209> (simula-67), (euclid), (clu) +...->Ada... Euclid is not really very much in the Simula 67 tradition. CLU may be. But surely Ada is *not* in the same line of derivation. Ada is a Pascal or Modula or Algol 68 descendant, and its real ancestor is little known LIS. Language history is a subtle and twisted subject, and I think that the diagram above is not very accurate, even to the point of being misleading. -- Piercarlo Grandi | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@aber.ac.uk