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From: hatcher@INGRES.BERKELEY.EDU (Doug Merritt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Language Wars
Message-ID: <8704210744.AA10632@ingres.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Tue, 21-Apr-87 02:44:46 EST
Article-I.D.: ingres.8704210744.AA10632
Posted: Tue Apr 21 02:44:46 1987
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In article <3865@sdcc3.ucsd.EDU> ma183say@sdcc3.ucsd.edu.UUCP (Lee Fountain) writes:
In article <3222@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike (My watch has windows) Meyer) writes:
>>Once you get past those (to a distance of about 4 feet :-), the two
>>languages are identical, and suffer the same problems:
>
>  Identical? Ha! (excuse me while I finish laughing).  Modula-2 is a
>  strongly-typed language compared to C, which has implicit type
>  transfer by the compiler.  Modula-2 does not have a preprocessor

Mike is speaking from an abstract point of view. You do not appear to
understand the difference between that and a worms-eye view of a language.
The kind of differences that you point out are pretty obvious, for one
thing, and for another, they are at the level where *all* languages are
different. Thus you trivialize Mike's comments, which actually were
quite valid whether you agree with the editorial side of them or not.

To an average programmer, every language and dialect is importantly
different than all others.

To a language designer, most languages look more similar than different,
because he considers more abstract issues. For example, although Modula-2
is more strongly typed than C, the really important issue is that neither
language allows you to manipulate types as conveniently as you can data.
This is a horrible inconsistency from a highly abstract point of view.

For pragmatic reasons, C and Modula-2 can both be good languages to
implement things in. For theoretical reasons, languages like Smalltalk
and FP are much cleaner.
	Doug Merritt	ucbvax!ingres!hatcher