🚀 go-pugleaf

>>>>> On 3 Dec 90 15:34:50 GMT, wgh@ubbpc.UUCP (William G. Hutchison) said:

William> I see at least two solutions:

William>  (1) Stop doing numerical work [ :-) ]
William>  (2) Find or develop a language suitable for this sort of work.

William>  Perhaps most practicioners would prefer solution (2) ???  I
William> like your suggestion of Turing.  Have you looked at Eiffel?
William> I am also investigating Occam.  Any opinions on this?  --

I have looked a bit at Turing and Turing-Plus.  They are very nicely
designed languages, but do not have the constructs for the kinds of
abstraction that I would like.  For example, they have neither
operator overloading nor class/object features.  They *do* have a very
clean design that helps one program with fewer errors, but the style
of programming is much the same as with the traditional
Fortran/C/Pascal.

My interests right now are leaning more toward Modula-3, because of
its support for classes/objects.  I am still trying to install it on
my IBM RS/6000 where its tendency to promote everything to double
precision actually causes codes to run faster instead of slower!  I
have also not found enough tutorial/reference information to enable me
to get a really good feel for how to go about using Modula-3
effectively.  I suppose that practice is the only teacher available
for the moment....

C++ is, of course, another possibility, but so far I have not seen any
C++ code that looks any easier to read or understand than the
equivalent C code -- though my lack of experience might be the
important factor here.
--
John D. McCalpin			mccalpin@perelandra.cms.udel.edu
Assistant Professor			mccalpin@brahms.udel.edu
College of Marine Studies, U. Del.	J.MCCALPIN/OMNET