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From: craig@dcl-cs.UUCP (Craig Wylie)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: structured assembler (really fast prototyping)
Message-ID: <997@dcl-cs.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 18-Feb-86 07:57:23 EST
Article-I.D.: dcl-cs.997
Posted: Tue Feb 18 07:57:23 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 20-Feb-86 08:16:35 EST
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Reply-To: craig@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Craig Wylie)
Distribution: net
Organization: Department of Computing at Lancaster University, UK.
Lines: 40

-- Mike Schwartz --
>>I agree that 'C' makes a good "prototyping" language - you might be able
>>to formulate a program fairly quick.  However, I believe that user-
>>friendliness has become a big issue in the software world, and that
>>a speedy program that takes less resources is much friendlier than the
>>'C' equivalent.
 
-- Bob Campbell --
>I don't agree that 'C' is a good prototyping language, as there are many
>languages that provide faster Build/Debug/Rebuild cycles, and better
>debugging tools.  However most of these languages (lisp, smalltalk, icon,
>snobal,...) are interpreted.

You miss out shell (be it sh, csh, ksh, msh etc ....)
One of the many uses of shell programming must be as a fast prototyping
language. It is quite easy to convert the resultant code into C (and I 
have discovered into Modula-2) at a later time.

We are often reminded that optimisation at too early a stage is dangerous,
shell programming offers an environment that allows the fast production and
debugging of programs without the problems of using linkers, debuggers etc...

What would people think about the introduction of structured data types
into shell ?

Shell is also both polymorphic and functional (using evaluation quotes),
sounds pretty good to me.

>Many of the early mistakes we in the area of optimizing things which

See comments above


Craig.
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