Whither goest all those languages we invent ....

The recent discussion of optimization mentioned BLISS as a
really good example. That started me thinking about the fact that BLISS
really made a splash initially and now one hardly hears about it.


Question: What are the causes of such a demise and what are the causes of
success?


This is a realistic question to ask now that such things as
hypercubes are making the scientific programming community rethink what
they're using. From what I know, C and FORTRAN are the most used in this
context.


Steve Stevenson steve@hubcap.clemson.edu
(aka D. E. Stevenson), dsteven@clemson.csnet
Department of Computer Science, (803)656-5880.mabell
Clemson Univeristy, Clemson, SC 29634-1906
[In the words of A. J. Perlis, "Fortran is the Fortran of the 80's." Bliss is
a swell language, but not so swell as to counter Fortran and C's cultural
advantages of having much existing useful code and many working
implementations. Besides, Bliss seemed to me to make it hard to write portable
code, and the array and pointer subscripting scheme was so beautifully general
as to be unusable. I speak from experience with Bliss-10 and Bliss-11, your
milage may have varied. -John]
--

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