Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ncis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!nosc!ucsd!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: <8784@megaron.arizona.edu>
Date: 19 Jan 89 18:31:05 GMT
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 31

In article  <5856@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> rjh@cs.purdue.EDU (Bob Hathaway) writes:
>>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
>
>Yes, use variant records in Pascal and Modula-2 and unchecked_conversion
>in Ada.

The question is _how_ you do it.  You have to use variant records in
Pascal and Modula-2 and unchecked_conversion in Ada.  This is because
the designers of Pascal, Modula-2, and Ada thought that sort of thing
was dangerous, and wanted to make it inconvenient to do.  The
inconvenience was supposed to discourage such practices, and the extra
syntax was supposed to make sure it didn't happen by accident.

I'm getting really tired this.  There seem to be some people out there
who are deliberately pretending not to understand what is meant by B&D
just for rhetorical effect.  They support their favorite languages by
pretending that the criticisms are vacous.  They fail to notice that
the criticisms are just negative responses to _deliberate_ goals in
the language design.  These exact same goals are the reason others
feel the languages are _good_ things.  Get it?  We critics take things
that supporters say are good, and we say they are bad.  So if the
languages don't have these bad features, then they don't have the good
ones either.  They are the same damn features.

If you don't think there is any substantive difference between C and
Modula-2, why do you use Modula-2?  Why not use a language which has
much broader distribution and is much better known?  Tell me why you
think Modula-2 is good, and you will be describing what I don't like
about it.