Re: Use of unaligned load/stores by compilers

Mike Albaugh wrote:


> Actually, some alleged C code that I inherited showed that a
> _truly_ determined programmer can write _BASIC_ in any language.


Many years ago, I used to teach students at college, some of whom had
never programmed before, and some of whom had programmed in BASIC at
high school. The first year we had a significant number of students
who had done the Basic programming, we compared the performance of the
two groups expecting to see that the students who did programming at
high school did significantly better in first year programming.


To our surprise, we found they did significantly worse!


One can take this as showing what a terrible language BASIC is. (It
could not possibly, of course, be showing what a terrible job teaching
we were doing.)


Who was it who originally said "There has not yet been invented a
language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad
programs"?.
[I've heard lots of anecdotal stories along the same lines about how
Tiny Basic rotted people's brains. It's certainly true that your first
programming language has a huge effect -- mine was Trac and look what
it did to me.


But this has strayed from compilers issues, language design other than
parts that affect compiler design belongs in comp.lang.misc. -John




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