Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!megatest!djones
From: djones@megatest.UUCP (Dave Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Call by string (was: B&D)
Message-ID: <1317@goofy.megatest.UUCP>
Date: 31 Jan 89 01:21:41 GMT
References: <4279@enea.se>
Organization: Megatest Corporation, San Jose, Ca
Lines: 21

From article <4279@enea.se>, by sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog):
...
> Some replay for newcomers: In the discussion about Bondage &
> Discipline langauges I said that a lanaguge like C was a B&D
> language if I want to call a routine by its name which I have
> in a string.

As I understand it, the originators of the term, "B&D language"
use it to refer to languages which prevent or make difficult
certain kinds of programming, not by simple omission, but because the
language designers deemed them Bad Things, and sought to prevent
them by decree.  C does not attempt to prevent you from writing 
a call-by-string routine. It just does not contain call-by-string
as a feature, presumably because the Founding Fathers did not need it
to write Unix.  I have written call-by-string in C for BSD4.2 and Sun3,
and it was not at all difficult.  The only problem was deciphering
the executable (dot-o) format.  The C part was easy. Machine-independence
is down the tubes, of course.  By making it part of the language,
you could move the porting problem from the application programmer
to the C-library programmer, which might be a win, if enough people
use the feature. But as it is, it's not B&D.