Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bu-cs!encore!pierson@mist
From: pierson@mist (Dan Pierson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Bondage and Discipline Languages
Summary: Modula-3 may finally have done it
Message-ID: <4509@xenna.Encore.COM>
Date: 28 Dec 88 17:07:01 GMT
References: <3300001@uxg.cso.uiuc.edu> <eWbWj#4OkIf8=eric@snark.UUCP>
Sender: news@Encore.COM
Reply-To: pierson@mist (Dan Pierson)
Organization: Encore Computer Corp
Lines: 39
In-reply-to: eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond)

In article <eWbWj#4OkIf8=eric@snark.UUCP>, eric@snark (Eric S. Raymond) writes:
>                             The European `bondage-and-discipline' school of
>language design (the people who brought you Algol-68, Pascal, Modula, Ada, and
>Modula-2 and are now having yet another try at getting their mistakes right in
>Modula-3) ...                                                     

Not to start a flame war over this matter of taste, but a couple of points:

1. I personally think that "they" may finally have gotten it right
   with Modula-3.  While the standard modules may need a bit more
   work, neither C nor C++ appeared at birth with complete standard
   libraries.  I think that world really needs a strongly typed
   language that is powerful, flexible, and efficient enough for
   production use while remaining portable and simple enough to be
   comprehensible and implementable.  I know it's heresy, but C is
   neither the most portable language around nor an all-around ideal
   language.  There are many areas in which a safer language is
   better.  While I'd miss the conciseness of C, I simply don't
   understand people who feel that being force to adhere to their own
   type abstractions intolerably cramps their style.  My experience is
   that all well written programs have a well (but maybe not
   explicitly) defined set of data types anyway, strongly typed
   languages simply protect against careless errors using these types.

2. "They" are neither European nor the same folks.  The Modula-3
   design team is more closely related to the people who created the
   Xerox Parc set of B&D languages which culminated in Cedar.  This is
   good both because Cedar looked like a very interesting system (the
   closest an Algol-descended imperative language has gotten to a Lisp
   environment) and because Wirth wasn't the designer.  Wirth has a
   history of designing 80% of a language and setting it free; the
   Modula-3 team made a serious attempt to design the whole thing
   before releasing it.
-- 
                                            dan

In real life: Dan Pierson, Encore Computer Corporation, Research
UUCP: {talcott,linus,necis,decvax}!encore!pierson
Internet: pierson@multimax.encore.com