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From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Dynamic typing (part 3)
Message-ID: <1124@optima.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 26 Mar 91 06:16:36 GMT
Sender: news@cs.arizona.edu
Lines: 28

In article  <1492@sheol.UUCP> Wayne Throop writes:
]
]It seems clear that David is misinterpreting the above statement.  There
]is NOT a fixation on efficency evident here...  the phrase "can, in
]principle, be compiled" means exactly what David means by "can be
]implemented" in this context. 

It will take a great deal of evidence to convince me that the Algol
committee members were so ignorant that they actually argued over the
implementability of anything in Algol 60.  There is nothing in the
language that any knowledgeable person would doubt can be implemented.

In fact, I can only think of two things that can't obviously be
compiled to machine code: nested scope and call-by-name.  Everything
else in the language has a fairly obvious machine implementation.

I want to clarify that my use of the term "psychotic" was intended as
hyperbole, not a serious criticism of the Algol committee.  But it is
just wrong to claim that they were trying to design a general notation
for describing algorithms without regard to implementation.  If that
were true they surely would have included sets, strings, graphs,
concatenatable sequences and other useful things in the language.  But
they did not because they wanted the language to be close in spirit to
computers.
--
					David Gudeman
gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
noao!arizona!gudeman