2 Jan
2022
2 Jan
'22
7:48 a.m.
Larry McVoy writes:
On Sat, Jan 01, 2022 at 08:04:58PM -0500, John Cowan
wrote:
I look at it slightly differently as the person who opened this particular
can of worms.
I'm not saying that the world should be fixed in stone; for example that
there should never be another language because we already have one.
I have trouble imagining how the features of C could be added to Fortran,
Lisp, or Cobol in a reasonably compatible manner. And I have no issue
with C not being an extension of an existing language even though it uses
some of the features of other languages; to me C was the first non-clunky
programming language. While I find C++ ugly, at least it uses C syntax
where possible making it a reasonable transition for programmers.
Going back to the original *roff discussion, I would have preferred to see
a ".2D" request for *roff that added two-dimensional formatting.
Guess what I'm saying is that I'm against change for the sake of change;
I'm not against innovation.
On Sat, Jan 1, 2022 at 7:13 PM Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
I'm almost speechless. My progression was Basic, Pascal, C (and later
Fortran, Lisp, no Cobol, I did an Ada Compiler so Ada I guess). Then
on to awk, perl, tcl, I tried to like C++ but couldn't, tried to like
Rust, Go, D, and couldn't.
If you think any of those other languages remotely approach the elegance
of C, I just don't know what to say.
C is beautiful, you look at the code and you can see what the hardware
will be doing but it isn't assembler. It's what assembler wished it
could be. It's the right mix of high enough that it works over all
architectures and low enough that you see the hardware.
You don't see the hardware with any of the other languages you listed. My big complaint with stuff like Rust, or even Go
(sorry Rob), is that they
picked a different syntax. Why not just use C syntax and extend it to do
what you want? Why must every project redo everything.
Why use C syntax? What was wrong with Fortran, Lisp, or Cobol syntax,
extended to do what you wanted?