🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <eZCUN#34OkqV=eric@snark.UUCP> (Eric S. Raymond) writes:

>My problem with B&D languages is that they have strong typing
>*with no escape mechanism* -- and no way to represent the 'real'
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>machine-level entities needed for systems programming. And primitive
>data type sets poorly matched to real-world application programming
>on real-world machines.

Attacking this problem was one of the major goals of the Turing language
recently reviewed in the Communications of the ACM....  I know that some
Turing people read this group - any comments?

>After all...who *needs* another conventional (that is to say, Algol/FORTRAN/
>BASIC-descended) procedural language right now? I think it's clear that the
>expressive potential of such languages has been pushed to its limit already;

Although I agree that the expressive potential of Algol-style procedural
languages has already been "expressed", it has not done so in a *single*
language (with the possible exception of Algol-68 :-)).  

I work in the field of high-performance scientific computing, and I have
no trouble claiming that there does not exist a "good" scientific programming
language for vector and parallel architectures.  There is no reason why
it cannot be done in the good old Fortran or Algol styles, it just has not
been done yet.

What I want is a strongly-typed procedural language that:
(1) understands data structures;
(2) provides an expressive and concise array syntax;
(3) allows for user specification of the precision of variables
    and constants in some machine-independent manner;
(4) allows specification of data-dependencies to aid coarse-grain
    parallelization;
(5) exists and produces good code on CDC/ETA and Cray supercomputers,
    and on my IRIS workstation :-) !

Perhaps something like the Fortran-8X extensions added to a Pascal-like
base language....

>      Eric S. Raymond                     (the mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews)
>      Email: eric@snark.uu.net                       CompuServe: [72037,2306]

John D. McCalpin
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