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From: nsw@cbnewsm.att.com (Neil Weinstock)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Subject: Re: Functional Programming (Re: Good programmers and assembly language)
Message-ID: <1991Apr16.042915.28382@cbnewsm.att.com>
Date: 16 Apr 91 04:29:15 GMT
References: <1529@tronsbox.xei.com> <7256@harrier.ukc.ac.uk> <00671693310@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM>
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Organization: The Flying Squid Patrol
Lines: 40

In article <00671693310@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM> elg@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM (Eric Lee Green) writes:
>From article <1535@tronsbox.xei.com>, by dfrancis@tronsbox.xei.com (Dennis Heffernan):
[ ... ]
>>       Still don't care how many lines it takes.  Since I don't code without
>
>You should. I program assembler with extensive comments, too, and I still
>have to do a whole lot more page-flipping to trace my flow of control than
>I do in "C". There's a point where conciseness wins. When I can get my
>entire function, my entire algorithm, onto one page of my screen (albeit
>that I generally run a severely overscanned interlaced screen!), that
>function becomes a WHOLE lot easier to debug. Now, I don't know about you,
>but I have a whole lot of difficulty doing that with assembler.
[ ... and later, in an unrelated point,  ... ]
>[My own personal opinion is that languages much higher level than C++ are
>impractical on common microcomputers due to their greater resource usage...
>or as Alan Perlis put it, "A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything
>and the cost of nothing."]

To tie these together (sort of :-/), a bunch of us in his class found it
amusing that the esteemed Dr. Perlis believed that APL was absolutely the
most readable language.  Why?  Because programs were so absurdly compact 
that you could almost always see them all at once on a page.  Yeeks!

Anyway, we cut him some slack because he despised Pascal and was therefore
OK in our books.

[ Perlis actually could have made the above quote to characterize APL
programmers.  We routinely struggled to find new and bizarre ways of doing
things in the fewest characters.  This often entailed using things like 6
dimensional array transforms, and other such monstrosities.  We shuddered at
the thought of what contortions we were causing the computer with our 30
characters of code... ]

An APL survivor,

                                   - Neil

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Neil Weinstock @ AT&T Bell Labs        //     What was sliced bread
att!edsel!nsw or nsw@edsel.att.com   \X/    the greatest thing since?