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From: dgary@ecsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Modula-2 faults - (nf)
Message-ID: <1246@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 23-Sep-83 09:32:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.1246
Posted: Fri Sep 23 09:32:06 1983
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Sep-83 12:02:42 EDT
References: hp-pcd.1891
Lines: 34


   My first impressions of Modula-2 were very positive, but I quickly
became disillusioned (a similar thing happened with Gerald Ford).
Since my objections are the same as everybody else's, I won't bore you
by ranting on END versus FI and OD, no character handling, cumbersome
I/O, etc.  I would like to drag two philosophical issues into the fray.
These aren't strictly specific to Modula-2, but it makes a nice
background.
   One important question is just how inflexible the language should
be in its data typing.  I'm not talking about languages like LISP and
APL which keep track of variable type for the user.  I'm speaking
rather of the FORTH-Pascal axis, with Pascal (the Edwin Newman of
programming languages) determined not to let the programmer get away
with anything, and FORTH, which would overwrite its own family if you
told it to.  Being a fan of Aristotle (I get everything he writes as
soon as it hits the stands), I prefer the middle course I get from
the PL/I compiler I use:  If I do something dangerous it raises all
kinds of hell but lets me do it.  I prefer this to being prohibited
altogether from using "dangerous" constructs, or having to fill out
twelve forms to seek permission from the compiler.  Curious that no
language definition I'm aware of (maybe Ada's, since I haven't got
through that DoD prose yet) makes provision for specifying warnings.
   Another consideration is how portable a language should be.  It
seems to me that the 8-16-32-64 family is well-enough established
(IBM and Burroughs mainframes, most minis, almost all micros) that
portability among this crowd is fine, even if we have to give up
compatibility with 12, 30, 36 and other weird architectures.  I'd
be satisfied with a language that demanded 8 bits in a character,
for example.  If only the order of bytes in a word had some official
or de facto standard...
   Anyway, what do you think?  Should languages guide programmers or
straitjacket them?  Should languages sacrifice universality if that
could make for greater efficiency and perhaps even more compatibility
among a large family of machines?