Re: Subjective report on the Compiler Construction '92

In article 92-10-052 dww@inf.fu-berlin.de writes:
>[Wirth] spoke on "30 Years of Programming Languages and Compilers", which
>included some controversial points and a lot of C-bashing ("Thirty years
>undone by C")...


Of course, the counterpoint to this is: "Thirty years and you still can't
compete with C? Just how hard have you been trying?". :-)


Actually, I agree that Wirth does have a point. But C's ascendancy is
partly his fault. The academic programming-language community (which I
was part of, in a small way, for a little while) spent far too long
designing clean, attractive languages which ignored certain dirty
practical issues that were of vital importance to many potential users.
(For example, consider Algol 60 vs. I/O, Algol 68 vs. implementation, and
Pascal vs. separate compilation and libraries.) Eventually the persistent
vacuum got filled by a language that did what the users wanted instead of
telling them they shouldn't want that.
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology, henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry
--

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