Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!littlei!ogcvax!pase
From: pase@ogcvax.UUCP (Douglas M. Pase)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: HLLs vs asm (was Re: portable "asm")
Message-ID: <1592@ogcvax.UUCP>
Date: 16 Mar 88 02:59:08 GMT
References: <11702@brl-adm.ARPA> <243@eagle_snax.UUCP> <2245@geac.UUCP> <1355@laidbak.UUCP> <703@l.cc.purdue.edu> <laidbak.1365>
Reply-To: pase@ogcvax.UUCP (Douglas M. Pase)
Organization: Oregon Graduate Center, Beaverton, OR
Lines: 28

In article <703@l.cc.purdue.edu> cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
|Frankly, I believe that if someone developed a decent high-level, overloaded
|operator, reasonable syntax assembler it would have a good chance of
|supplanting C.  Add the other useful features of C and you have a good
|language.

A suggestion for all those Monday morning quarterbacks out there who love to
rip on other languages:  If you have such great ideas, design and implement
your own.  You'll discover that making a language consistent throughout can be
a major task.  You'll discover that writing the compiler is not always the
most difficult part of the process -- but writing the compiler will show you
many of the holes.  You'll also discover that your idea of a "perfect language"
may not be so widely held.  When you're done, report the results and distribute
the compiler, then let the general public be the judge.  If your ideas are as
good as you really think, you'll be acclaimed a hero and go down in history as
one of the all time greats -- up there with Nikky W. and the infamous K&R.
Jim (uh, John -- no, Jim...) Backus will probably even personally shake your
hand.

If you think you really can do better than ``C'' or some other successful
language, *** DO IT ***.  (Though I generally detest Fortran and Pascal, I
doubt I could have done much better at the time they were created -- for the
niches they fill.)  I would be suprised if your design were much different
from existing languages (except perhaps in minor details -- 0/1 trip loops,
0/1 based arrays, for-do-while vs DO-REPEAT-etc., `;' as terminator/separator,
and so forth.)
-- 
Doug Pase  --  ...ucbvax!tektronix!ogcvax!pase  or  pase@cse.ogc.edu (CSNet)