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From: drw@cullvax.UUCP (Dale Worley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.c
Subject: The Real World
Message-ID: <1430@cullvax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 4-Aug-87 10:59:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: cullvax.1430
Posted: Tue Aug  4 10:59:08 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Aug-87 01:54:11 EDT
Organization: Cullinet Software, Westwood, MA, USA
Lines: 34
Xref: mnetor comp.lang.lisp:373 comp.lang.c:3460

roberts@cognos.uucp (Robert Stanley) writes:
> Until we get much more powerful computing systems out in the field, remembering
> that the lag to plain old boring commercial DP in the field is about 15 years,
> all persons writing 'real' applications will at some point be obsessed by
> efficiency.  Further, human nature tends to leave us doing things the way we've
> always done them.  How long has it taken for the concept of GOTO-less programs
> to reach grunt level?  Has it?  It will take a long time to wean programmers
> from pointers, even if there is an adequate alternative.  Adequate of course is
> a mutable measurement, depending on local context.

Interestingly, the "fourth generation" business application
development language that my employer (Cullinet) sells has no goto.
It is a very popular product (about 50,000 programmers use it).  I was
amazed, because, though the academics rail about GOTO, very few
"academic" language omit it, and here in the lowbrow world of EDP, the
GOTO was just defined away...

> I can
> name at least one heavy-duty bug that remained undetected for years for each of
> several different language implementations.  Undetected for years means that
> the feature was essentially unused.

Don't bet on it!  Many people program by trial-and-error, "tweak it
until it works".  These programmers don't notice implementation
errors, because they don't understand the difference between "what the
language is specified to do" and "what the implementation does".  On
comp.lang.c there's a message every so often that starts "Well, it
works on *my* compiler, so therefore it's correct C."

Dale
-- 
Dale Worley	Cullinet Software		ARPA: cullvax!drw@eddie.mit.edu
UUCP: ...!seismo!harvard!mit-eddie!cullvax!drw
OS/2: Yesterday's software tomorrow