Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!lfcs!nick
From: nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Nick Rothwell)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Anyone want to design a language?
Message-ID: <2386@castle.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 20 Feb 90 16:28:27 GMT
References: <22569:05:10:24@stealth.acf.nyu.edu> <2346@castle.ed.ac.uk> <12336@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Nick Rothwell)
Organization: Waldorf Micro-Wave Tracking/Sighting/Authentication Subcommittee
Lines: 27
In-reply-to: poser@csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill Poser)

In article <12336@csli.Stanford.EDU>, poser@csli (Bill Poser) writes:
>I don't quite agree. It's true that there are too many low-level
>languages (and there probably always will be), but there is a role
>for languages of this type. Many of the new-fangled languages are either
>nice for limited sorts of tasks (e.g. logic programming languages)
>or carry with them a lot of overhead and or "protection" from low-level
>aspects of the machine. However much you may like ML or Prolog or
>whatever, there is a role for system programming languages, and C
>is one of the best.

True; but the original article said something about programmers being
able to agree on the nice features of a language; whereas what you're
saying above (and I agree) is that this will never happen, since (for
example) I'm going to be hacking away in C on my Mac for a long while
yet, even though I think C is dreadful and that programming language
design has moved on a long way.

I think, though, that any serious time and effort on designing a
better C-style language would be better spent getting decent modern
languages to a state of maturity.

		Nick.
--
Nick Rothwell,	Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh.
		nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk    <Atlantic Ocean>!mcvax!ukc!lfcs!nick
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