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From: gwyn@BRL.ARPA.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re:  Reply to steven@ucbvax.berkeley
Message-ID: <8705211711.aa05300@VGR.BRL.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 21-May-87 17:11:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: VGR.8705211711.aa05300
Posted: Thu May 21 17:11:51 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 23-May-87 08:20:22 EDT
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How can anyone take your evaluation of relative merits of programming
languages seriously when you have made so many factual errors in your
posting?

Programming and data entry are two different activities.  C was never
designed to be used in a punched-card environment.  C pointers are a
key feature of the language, which after all was originally designed
primarily for systems programming on "bare metal".  The C run-time
support for hosted environments developed later, as C was discovered
to be both high-level and low-level enough for a wide range of uses.

Don Knuth certainly did not produce the TeX-based facilities "all by
himself".  In particular, LaTex was primarily produced by Leslie
Lamport.  The TeX language is just as horrible as troff's (which has
provided comparable facilities for many years), only different, and
TeX has never been free of bugs (which should surprise nobody except
those who think that a suitable language is all that's needed to have
perfect code).  Knuth also did not use Standard Pascal; he relied
heavily on the availability of "other" in case statements.  Porting TeX
is not simply a matter of taking the "portable" source and compiling
it.  He didn't use pointers because Pascal pointers are painful and
untyped; this has no bearing on whether C pointers are useful or not.

How could anyone criticize scanf()'s handling of newline, which is
under the C programmer's control in the first place and which can be
totally bypassed in favor of other input facilities tailored to the
application in the second place, as opposed to Pascal's READLN?
(Scanf() has some problems, but that's not one of them.)  How could
anyone think "dest := src" is intuitive while "strcpy(dest,src)" is
counter-intuitive?

Certainly the C language has its blemishes, but to pretend that other
languages such as Modula-2 don't and to criticize C for not being just
like some other language is merely to reveal one's personal background,
not any absolute "reason".  C can be used well; Pascal can be used
well; Ada can be used well; even BASIC can be used well.  Of these, I
find C the most universally useful for a wide range of applications.
(Modula-2 might be a contender if I could count on existence of
compilers for it everywhere.)  But I consider other languages for a
project, and I sometimes develop a language tailored to the application's
needs.  (If portability is even remotely a consideration, I make damn
sure I can quickly implement the language everywhere.  Software
economics involves far more than simply selecting a programming language.)