Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!dimacs.rutgers.edu!rutgers!cbmvax!cbmehq!cbmger!peterk
From: peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Subject: Re: Functional Programming (Re: Good programmers and
Message-ID: <1125@cbmger.UUCP>
Date: 17 Apr 91 07:07:44 GMT
References: <1529@tronsbox.xei.com> <7256@harrier.ukc.ac.uk> <00671693310@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM> <1991Apr16.042915.28382@cbnewsm.att.com> <16APR91.08223865@uc780.umd.edu>
Reply-To: peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY)
Organization: Commodore Bueromaschinen GmbH, West Germany
Lines: 47

In article <16APR91.08223865@uc780.umd.edu> cs450a03@uc780.umd.edu writes:
>Neil Weinstock writes:
>
>>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!
>
>I hope he had something of a sense of balance...  programming for
>compactness instead of readability can just as easily destroy all
>readability as it can improve readability (witness many programs in
>the obfuscated C contest).

This is an aspect also I find very important. Simply put: I really
*HATE* languages where I'm only allowed for one statement per line.
I remember colleagues of mine with those BIG lineprinter printouts
(140 colums wide) and ALL their programs only covered the left
20 to 40 columns on this paper in Fortran, yuck.

You must see, I learned programming in Algol 60 (Pascal not on the
horizon back then), where I could write very structured but compact
code. And the same can be done with C or modern BASIC dialects (and
nearly all other modern languages). I really need to have a portion
of the program as big as possible at one time in my view, be it on
a printout or on screen. You lose so much of the thread when you have
to page back and forth like wild.

So, GFA Basic may be one of the fastest things on earth, but it has
only one statement per line, nothing good for me, sorry. (They also
tell me about lots of bugs...)

Ok, assembler is a different story. There you normally use the rest
of the line for comments which are really necessary in assembler.

To tie this with another thread:
I advocate also for the style to write the most of a program in a
HLL and only do critical parts in assembler. I once (on the PET :-)
had an example with a real big program in Basic plus a 20-byte
assembler routine, where the latter speeded things up by factor 10
to 100. I found this adequate. But at the same time I knew it wouldn't
give any further performance if I wrote also the big rest in assembler,
so I didn't.

-- 
Best regards, Dr. Peter Kittel  // E-Mail to  \\  Only my personal opinions... 
Commodore Frankfurt, Germany  \X/ {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!cbmger!peterk