Re: Have we reached the asymptotic plateau of innovation in programming languages

From: "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com>
> On Jun 7, 1:21 pm, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson
> <joh...@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:


>> Another point to make. Why do we assign from right to left? Is it in
>> any way natural? What's wrong with
>>
>> a + b --> c "a plus b assigned to c"
>>
>> instead of
>>
>> c <-- a + b "c becomes a + b?"
>>
>> The more I think about it, I believe the former construct is a bit more
>> natural since we read from left to right. However, I'd want to see or
>> work on a non-trivial project in such a language to make up my mind.


And what about languages that read from the top of the page to the bottom?


> But we already have languages that support
>
> a b + c ! ( stack based, for bang read store )


Indeed, the earliest was Hamblin's GEORGE of 1957,
the above written as a b + (c)
where the parentheses indicated a store operation.


And his loop:


0
1, 10 rep (j)
      read
      (a)
      +
]
print


the meaning of which should be fairly clear as to sum 10 values
and to print that sum.
The square bracket is for end-of-loop.

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