30 Jun
2016
30 Jun
'16
11:08 a.m.
scj(a)yaccman.com scripsit:
Steve Bourne tried hard to interest us in A68, and I
personally liked some
features of it (especially the automatic type morphing of arguments into
the expected types). But the documentation was a huge barrier--all the
familiar ideas were given completely new (and unintuitive) names, making
it very difficult to get into.
I heartily agree. That and the van Wijngaarden grammar were serious
roadblocks to understanding, though such grammars are themselves very
elegant, especially in the form used by the Revised Report.
I may be biased in my view, but I think one fatal
mistake that A68 made
was that it had no scheme for porting the language to the plethora of
computers and systems around at that time. (The Bliss language from CMU
had a similar problem, requiring a bigger computer to compile for the
PDP-11). Pascal had P-code, and gave C a real run, especially as a
teaching language. C had PCC.
Indeed.
--
John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org
That you can cover for the plentiful and often gaping errors, misconstruals
and disinformation in your posts through sheer volume -- that is another
misconception. --Mike to Peter