Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!gatech!hubcap!ncrcae!ncrlnk!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!dan-hankins From: dan-hankins@cup.portal.com (Daniel B Hankins) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Bondage and Discipline Languages Message-ID: <13073@cup.portal.com> Date: 31 Dec 88 02:13:31 GMT References: <3300001@uxg.cso.uiuc.edu> <4509@xenna.encore.com> Organization: The Portal System (TM) Lines: 36 In article eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond) writes: >Wanna start a pool on the announcement date of Modula-4? Have a look at Oberon. Save for its omission of multitasking, it appears to be a winner. Very small language, small compiler, highly optimizing, more expressive power than C or Modula-2 while still capable of getting down and dirty with the machine. >My problem with B&D languages is that they have strong typing *with no >escape mechanism* -- and no way to represent the 'real' machine-level >entities needed for systems programming. And primitive data type sets >poorly matched to real- world application programming on real-world >machines. Modula-2 certainly *does* have an escape mechanism - type casts are perfectly legal. And the primitive data types of BYTE and WORD should take care of just about all the rest. >the action now is in second-generation OO languages like C++ and Eiffel, >or in more exotic areas like pure-functional or non-procedural languages. Ummm, OO languages are, strictly speaking, non-procedural (unless they are hybrids such as C++ or Eiffel). Nobody could accuse Smalltalk or Self of being procedural, yet they are two of the most OO languages around. But in general, I'll agree with this statement. It's really time to finish up futzing around with procedural languages and get into OO bigtime. The major problem is that there are *so* many programmers out there who have a very hard time in thinking in any but the procedural paradigm. Eiffel and Oberon might be two ways to gradually introduce the timid to the concepts of OO languages, rather like building an automobile shaped like a horse-drawn carriage, only without the horses. Dan Hankins