Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!joyce!sri-unix!garth!phipps
From: phipps@garth.UUCP (Clay Phipps)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: What is B&D? (Re: Bondage and Discipline Languages)
Message-ID: <2399@garth.UUCP>
Date: 13 Jan 89 06:41:37 GMT
References: <8540@megaron.arizona.edu> <2630@ficc.uu.net> <13293@cup.portal.com> <5795@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <2670@ficc.uu.net>
Reply-To: phipps@garth.UUCP (Clay Phipps)
Organization: INTERGRAPH (APD) -- Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 37

In article <2670@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>In article <5795@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>, rjh@cs.purdue.EDU (Bob Hathaway) writes:
>> Lets please stop using the term B&D languages, 
>> this is a bad analogy and a heavily biased opinion.  
>Pascal is the common example. 

Let's not take ourselves too seriously, here.
Just fight back.  Create a label for the languages favored by those
who created the term "B&D", and see if you can get it to catch on.  
"B&D" obviously has.

For philosophical background on the "B&D" languages, see especially:

    Niklaus Wirth: "On The Design Of Programming Languages"
    (invited paper), Proc. of IFIP 1974, p. 386..393
    (maybe reprinted in the ~1985 IEEE anthology of language design papers).

Wirth emphasized the importance of simplicity, especially in designing 
a new language, and preferred "transparence and clarity of its features, 
and by a regular structure" over "conciseness and unwanted generality".
Intelligent people can disagree over notions of what constitutes "simplicity".
It is ironic that Wirth was a grad student at Berkeley, 
undoubtedly one of the spiritual centers of C partisanship.

Folks on the other side of S.F. Bay might wish to see

    C.A.R. Hoare: "Hints On Programming Language Design",
    Stanford A.I. Lab memo AIM 224/C.S. Dept. Report CS-403, October 1973.

Hoare's paper also emphasizes the importance of simplicity.

What has Ritchie written on his philosophy of language design ?
-- 
[The foregoing may or may not represent the position, if any, of my employer]
 
Clay Phipps                       {ingr,pyramid,sri-unix!hplabs}!garth!phipps
Intergraph APD, 2400#4 Geng Road, Palo Alto, CA 93403            415/494-8800