Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!agate!bionet!ig!arizona!gudeman
From: gudeman@arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: What is B&D? (Re: Bondage and Discipline Languages)
Message-ID: <8684@megaron.arizona.edu>
Date: 12 Jan 89 02:23:30 GMT
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 30

In article  <5818@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> rjh@cs.purdue.EDU (Bob Hathaway) writes:
]David Gudeman writes:
]...
]>You don't lable a language ``B&D'' just because you can't do something
]>in that language, you call it that because (1) there is something you
]>can't do, (2) the designers of the language predicted people would
]>>want to do it, and (3) the designers deliberately made it impossible
]>because they thought it was a bad thing to do.
]
]This sounds like you don't know programming as well as compiler writers,
]language designers, programming language hobbyists,

I _am_ a compiler writer, language designer and programming language
hobbyist.  Language design and implementation are the main subjects of
my PhD research.

] ...  I, and several
]others I have talked to can do anything we can do in C in Pascal, Modula,
]Ada, etc...

As far as doing anything you want, obviously you can.  Theoretically
all programming languages are computationaly equivalent.  The question
is _how_ you do it.  Can you treat a variable as an integer at one
point then turn around and make it a pointer?  If your first reaction
is that no one should ever do that, then you may as well use police
state languages.  It's hard for me to think of other examples, because
it has been so long since I've been interested in this class of
languages.  They are really all so similar and _boring_.  (I mean the
class of medium-level algorithmic languages including Algol, FORTRAN,
COBOL, Pacal, C, Ada, etc., both police state and anarchy types.)