🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <26865@megaron.cs.arizona.edu>, gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes:
> In article  <961@skye.cs.ed.ac.uk> nick@cs.edinburgh.ac.uk (Nick Rothwell) writes:
> ]In article <1990Oct25.193935.375@arnor.uucp>, strom@arnor.uucp writes:
> ]> many program bugs are the result of issuing otherwise correct operations
> ]> *in the wrong order*
> 
> ]Just a minor point here - that's a fault with conventional procedural
> ]languages with assignable variables, and nothing to do with typechecking.
> ]Functional and logic languages don't have this problem at all.
> 
> First, some functional languages and the only well-known logic
> language (Prolog) certainly _do_ have this problem.  If you do things
> in the wrong order, you may get peculiar results like non-termination.

Ok, I stand corrected. The way I read the original article is that there
are problems with referring to variables which are unassigned or which
go out of scope (dangling pointers and the like). Higher-level languages
don't have these problems. But, yes, you still have to "do things in
the right order" in the sense you mean.

> Basically someone screwed-up somewhere, and changing the paradigm
> just changes the nature of the screw-ups, not the quantity or the
> quality.  This is not to say that changing the language itself can't
> reduce errors, just that there is no reason to assume that functional
> or logic languages by the fact of being function-based or predicate
> logic-based reduce errors.

True, but I think the fact that assignment is non-existent (or kept
to a minimum), the fact that the languages are garbage-collected and
heap-safe, make them "better" in this sense. That isn't an argument
about which paradigm to use (and that wasn't really the impression
I wanted to give).


> 					David Gudeman

		Nick.

-- 
Nick Rothwell,	Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh.
		nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk    <Atlantic Ocean>!mcsun!ukc!lfcs!nick
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 "Now remember - and this is most important - you must think in Russian."