🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BEVAN.92Nov11191720@beluga.cs.man.ac.uk> bevan@cs.man.ac.uk (Stephen J Bevan) writes:

   In article <1992Nov10.024021.8724@linus.mitre.org> crawford@boole.mitre.org (Randy Crawford) writes:
      I defy the critics in this forum to devise a programming language which has 
      the ability to outperform C given the constraints I have listed above.

   Why devise, there are _thousands_ of languages already.  Off the top
   of my head, the following would all give C a run for its money, but
   verifying it might me quite a difficult task:- el(alpha), FORTH,
   Turing, various Algol 68 subsets, RCC, Modula II, Oberon(-2) and Turbo
   Pascal.

Much as I dislike C, I disagree. FORTH doesn't even come close in
either efficiency or usability (imagine: syntax even worse than that
of C). Oberon and Algol-68 (Turing as far as I know as well) are
higher-level, with associated runtime costs and difficulties for
low-level access/interfacing. I don't know about RCC or "el(alpha)".
Turbo Pascal is a CPM/MSDOS specialty language--it's not difficult to
be a "portable systems programming language" for a single machine.

The only language that I would imagine might be a serious alternative
to C among those that you have listed is Modula-2, but I'm not
sufficiently familiar with its low-level features to say whether it
could cover the same breadth of system-programming problems that C
covers.

					Thomas.