🚀 go-pugleaf

This appeared in comp.lang.fortran.  The article quoted appears after
my comments.

A language is a means of communication.  Unlike hardware tools, languages
can be even interspersed.  To someone who knows more than one language, 
sentences, phrases, and even words in different languages can be strung
together in a meaningful fashion.

The hardware is the tool.  The communications scheme should be such as to
enable the programmer to make use of the tool.  This is not possible now.

It seems that the various groups of language designers seem more concerned
with restricting the language than in having it a means of communication.
We have functional languages, object-oriented languages, numerical processing
languages, list processing languages, statistical languages, etc.  None of them
is any good if the problem does not fall in the slot.  These languages tend to
have unnatural restrictions in their syntax.

We need a language with reasonable syntax with which we can communicate with the
computer.  It will necessarily have to contain a super-assembler.  Such a beast,
with a flexible macro processor, and a user-rewritable flexible syntax, would
enable someone like me to produce good code at a comparable rate to the HLLs.
HLL features can be added; I have no opposition to that.  But we cannot afford
languages like the present analogues of Basic English, where the language takes
the position that something cannot be said.
----------
In article <1990Jul25.210639.20509@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>, gl8f@astsun8.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl) writes:
> In article <11029@chaph.usc.edu> ajayshah@aludra.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) writes:
> 
> >I recently hit a research group which worked exclusively in
> >fortran, and had to write fortran for a while, and was it a
> >nightmare!!  A language which has no data structures to speak of,
> >no dynamic allocation, no recursion, everything passed by
> >reference, no checking for number/type of arguments to
> >functons/subroutines, no control over scoping..not to mention the
> >silly syntactic irritations.
> 
> If you were using FORTRAN 77 to write programs which need the features
> it doesn't have, you're using the wrong tool. Use another one. If you
> are writing programs for which F77 is good, use it. It just so happens
> that the programs I write fit the F77 model well.
> 
> BTW, checking the number/type of arguments to functions/subroutines is
> something which can be done. The Sun compiler doesn't do it, but
> running the code through f2c does.
> 
> Followups to alt.religion.computers.
> 
> --
> "In fact you should not be involved in IRC." -- Phil Howard


-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet)	{purdue,pur-ee}!l.cc!cik(UUCP)