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From: mjr@osiris.UUCP (Marcus J. Ranum)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Compatibility with EBCDIC
Message-ID: <1350@osiris.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 21-Aug-87 08:42:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: osiris.1350
Posted: Fri Aug 21 08:42:11 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 23-Aug-87 00:45:51 EDT
References: <8915@brl-adm.ARPA>
Organization: The Bavarian Illuminati, Inc.
Lines: 45
Summary: moronic logic

In article <8915@brl-adm.ARPA>, crowl@cs.rochester.EDU (Lawrence Crowl) writes:
> 
> I assume this applies to character sets also.  Since you are talking about
> EBCDIC, are you implying the 360 architecture was badly designed.  This claim
> will need VERY good arguments to over-ride 25 years (almost) of success.

Stone hammers, along with flint knives, showed more success (in years) 
than EBCDIC architecture, but nobody uses them anymore. Only the trailing
edge of technology still supports 360 architecture... Arguing that 
your flint axe has had '2000 years of success' is not going to change the
fact that the times have changed. Do you also favor laser-optical card
reader technology ?

> If we just throw out C, a sixties language with many limitations, we have
> solved the problem, haven't we?  Throwing out C would also reduce the net
> traffic.  We have the programming language of the future waiting for
> us, Ada.  (Well, it at least dates from the seventies.)

Future ? Yeah - ADA will be with us a long time. Because the DoD has
said they don't want anything else. I hope you're not going to argue
that ADA's popularity is an indicator of how good it is... "Gee, ADA
must be great !! EVERYONE in the DoD uses it !! WOW !!". Your logic
is not very good. Throwing out 'C' is not a bad idea. I will, especially
if it gets junked up too badly be all the people who want it to run on
their machines, under their braindead architecture. I suppose next the
FORTRAN programmers will be asking the 'C' support a set of FORTRAN
intrinsics, for compatibility...

> 
>>We should certainly make an effort to accomodate all widely-used
>>architectures, but not at the expense of seriously distorting the language
> 
> It is the architecture's fault or C's fault that C needs some distorting?
> Very few people have to distort Lisp to put it on a new architecture.

	This is due to the amazing self-distorting nature of Lisp :-)
In all seriousness, from what I gather, there are as many versions of
Lisp out there as there are of 'C'...

--mjr();
-- 
If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical,
go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I get as crude as possible. These
days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire
to crudeness...			         -Johnny Mnemonic