Re: What makes a language popular?

In article <644@ima.ISC.COM> Duncan C White <harvard!seismo!mcvax!doc.ic.ac.uk!dcw> writes:
>
>How many people, when asked a question about PASCAL's syntax, will
>say "hang on while I get out my copy of the ISO standard"... and
>how many will reach for their Jensen and Wirth ?


Well, we don't use much Pascal here, and we don't have many arguments
about C (not too many C programmers here). But we DO do a lot of FORTRAN.
When problems in porting a program between machines come up, we DO reach for
the ANSI/ISO/FIPS standard (all the same document) to figure out who was
right and who was wrong (as far as it being FORTRAN that is; most of the
"wrong" stuff is an extension of the standard).


FORTRAN of course, may be different (:-)) from other languages; particularly
it doesn't have a K&R or J&W equivalent.
mike


Michael Fischbein msf@prandtl.nas.nasa.gov
                                                                    ...!seismo!decuac!csmunix!icase!msf
These are my opinions and not necessarily official views of any
organization.
[I suppose it helps that the Fortran standard is quite readable, unlike,
say, the PL/I standard. This discussion is too far afield from compilers,
so I'm sending it to comp.lang.misc. -John]
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