🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <D_D27L1xds13@ficc.uu.net>, peter@ficc (Peter da Silva) writes:
>There are only two languages I know of in which you can take a moderately
>complex program and run it, without modification, on a wide variety of
>platforms.
>
>One is Fortran, with the Software Tools library.
>The other is C.
>it's going to take more than
>theoretical arguments about safety to make me change. It's going to take
>working code.

Which is a quite reasonable argument. Pointer-safe languages generally
require garbage-collected heaps, which means size. So I can see that
a language like C which is required to run on Machines With Tiny
Brains will not be "safe" in that respect.

But, this leaves two issues open: (i) why C has such an idiotic
syntax, arbitrary type-checking, lax compile-time checks and so on,
and (ii) why people think that C's features provide "power" in
general-purpose programming. Point (i) is an accident of history.
Point (ii) still intrigues me.

>For what other language can I get compatible compilers for:
>	UNIX
>	IBM-PC
>	Amiga
>	Atari ST
>	Macintosh
>	RSX-11/M
>	VAX/VMS
>	RMX-86

I find that C's adherence to an implementation-defined word size limits
portability anyway; but I don't think that's an avoidable problem.

>The only other language system that came close was UCSD Pascal, and
>it's dead.

And we mourn its passing. Full PASCAL and screen editor in 56K.
Them were the days.

> _--_|\  `-_-' Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. <peter@ficc.uu.net>.

		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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