Path: utzoo!attcan!lsuc!ncrcan!brian
From: brian@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM (Brian Onn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Turing programming language.
Keywords: programming language
Message-ID: <1138@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM>
Date: 21 Jan 89 00:54:33 GMT
References: <11@euteal.UUCP>
Reply-To: brian@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM (Brian Onn)
Organization: NCR Canada Ltd., Mississauga, Ontario
Lines: 46

In article <11@euteal.UUCP> mart@euteal.UUCP (Mart van Stiphout) writes:
> have just been reading 'The Turing programming Language'
> in Communications of the ACM of Dec. 1988.
> At first I was enthousiatic because it has a number of things
> I line, such as dynamic arrays, nice strings, etc.
> But then look at the syntax. This is one hell of a mess.
> I especially hate the very ugly loop statement.

Gosh.  You just can please everyone, can you. 

How can you say this?  Compared to (what I've seen of) Modula, Turing is a
blessing.  It's syntax is also a heckuva lot cleaner than Pascal's.  I don't
know Ada, so can't make a comparison here.  Saying that Turing is "one hell
of a mess" is a very strong statement that just isn't true.

The loop statement is very clean and easy to work with:

	loop
		exit when ...
	end loop

It is very clear where the loop begins and ends, and under what conditions
it should terminate.  The exit test can be placed any where in the loop,
so "while <condition> do" and "do ... while <condition>"  loops can be
achieved with ease, as well as variations thereof.

> And what about the cumbersome linked list example on
> page 1415.

Sorry, I haven't read the CACM article, so can't comment here. But I
have written linked list code in Turing, and it wasn't that cumbersome.
The facilities provided by the language are very nice to work with, and
ensure that you are not doing what you shouldn't be doing with memory
pointers.  Records, collections, free() and nil() are all well implemented
in Turing.

> I wonder of Alan Turing likes it.

I am sure he would. 

Brian.
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