🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <FISCHER.92Dec30223532@orange.iesd.auc.dk> fischer@iesd.auc.dk (Lars Peter Fischer) writes:
>
>>>>>> "Michael" == Michael Malak (malak@grebyn.com)
>
>Michael>    1) It has structured syntactic blocks for constants, types and
>Michael>       variables.
>
>Which is not much of an advantage. Look at all the pain Knuth has gone
>through to work around it.

	Could you explain? Seems to me that the simple concept
of nesting the symbol table so that symbols go out of scope
at the end of the block is very nice.

>
>Michael>    2) It has nested procedures.
>
>Sound like a neat idea but isn't a big deal in practice. Modules in
>much better. If you keep your modules (files in C) small, and keep
>functions local (static) you rarely need nested procedures. Note that
>Wirth is abandoning the idea, too.

	Dont quite agree. Many 'mess-arounds' in C could be avoided
if nested proceedures were supported. C's failure to provide them
possibly results from being designed with archaic architectures
in mind.

	Functional decomposition is a valid technique in my opinion.
So is partitioning the state space with objects. Forcing the programmer
to use data decomposition because functional decomposition is not
properly supported is against the spirit of C++ in my opinion.

>
>Michael>    3) Most importantly, the good structured programming professors
>Michael>       wouldn't be caught dead teaching C (biggotry in my opinion).
>
>A professor that believes the notion of structured programming is tied
>to a specific language should be teaching gardening instead.
>
	But C cannot be used easily for functional decomposition
because it doesn't provide proper support for nested functions.
Structured design may not be tied to a specific language,
but structured programming in a structured language is certainly
easier than in a non-structured one. Do you really want to
write code in the old BASIC (you know, the one with line numbers
and GOSUB without parameters?)

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