🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990May15.152529.7427@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
gvcormack@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Gordon V. Cormack) writes:
 
>Here is a test for your new phrase.  Substituting it for X below should
>yield a true statement.
>
>   FP, Miranda, Scheme and ML are X, but 
>	      Ada, Fortran, and C are not X.
>
>
>   I'm not sure whether Lisp and Algol 68 are X, not X, or partially X.

Algol 68, like its predecessor Algol 60, had some embarrassing problems.
One of Algol 68's bugs was that even though it had procedures as
allegedly first-class citizens, higher-order procedures were impossible.
This was a consequence of the incredibly baroque type structure (which
was all defined in the syntax, and included syntactic categories such as
"refety rowsety ROWWSETY nonrow slice", and, in one draft, "FIRM MOIST
PARADE"), in which a higher-order procedure would have had to have had
an infinitely recursive type, in addition to requiring heap storage for
closures. 

It's a mark of the advances in both programming languages and in
hardware and software that neither problem is serious in modern
functional languages.
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