Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!lfcs!db
From: db@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Dave Berry)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: To trust or not to trust (Re: What is B&D?)
Message-ID: <1286@etive.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 24 Jan 89 15:06:31 GMT
References: <8846@megaron.arizona.edu>
Sender: news@etive.ed.ac.uk
Reply-To: db@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Dave Berry)
Organization: Laboratory for the Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh U
Lines: 26

In article <8846@megaron.arizona.edu> gudeman@arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes:
>I have never said that totalitaritan languages are without value, just that
>they are not as general-purpose as their supporters would have us believe.

I thought you just claimed that they were a bit more inconvenient?  In a
recent article you emphasised that this was all you meant.

>By the way, all of the languages I listed [Lisp, Prolog, SNOBOL, ...] are
>higher level than any totalitarian language I know of.

Many functional languages are fairly "totalitarian", as regards their type
systems.  I presume it weas someone else who claimed that Prolog was a
totalitarian language.

BTW, I don't believe that I'm wilfully misunderstanding you.  I believe that
you're being inconsistent.

"Putting your case so that it can be misunderstood is not enough -- you must
present it so that it cannot be misunderstood."
	- Bundy et. al., "How to get a Ph.D. in A.I."
(Good advice, but damn difficult to do.)


Dave Berry,	Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh.
		db%lfcs.ed.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk
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