Re: Re: New Book: The School of Niklaus Wirth

Michael Lee Finney <michael.finney@acm.org> wrote :
....
> Semantic richness is far more important than minimizing the size of
> the compiler -- the latter goal simply is not of interest to me at
> all. I consider PASCAL and Wirth's successive languages (including
> ADA) to be the worst languages on Earth (and, at one time, I did have
> to use some of them for quite some time <shudder>).


I agree about Pascal (at least the original version, before
everyone started extending it -- differently), but Ada
(initial cap, these are both proper names not acronyms)
while the surface syntax has some similarity to Pascal,
and I have heard to JOVIAL (I don't know that myself),
1) was not designed or AFAIK even affected by Wirth, and
2) most definitely does not try to minimize the compiler
and related tools. It has all the semantic richness I think
you can ask for in a "normal" (imperative) 3GL. If anything
it has the PL/1 disease of including so many options
and choices that people can end up using mutually
incomprehensible but completely legal subsets.
(I know of one Ada implementation, on a fairly large
multiprocessor system a few years back, where
you could not run an Ada program with its runtime support
under the debugger on a single CPU without the equivalent
of a panic; the vendor supplied instructions on how to set
system options to force them into different CPUs!)
--
- David.Thompson 1 now at worldnet.att.net
[Ada was designed by competitive bid. The winner was the "green"
language designed by a group in France. -John]

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